A review by paulataua
The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid

3.0

‘A Mermaids Singing’ certainly has the ingredients of harrowing thriller; Tony Hill, a criminal profiler trying to come to terms with his own sexual problem, Carol Jordan, a female police officer making her way in a traditionally male world, and the murderer, a strange character spurred on by an obsession with torture. So much promise, but it really didn’t work for me. Hill’s profiling was interesting, but didn’t seem to go anywhere, his intimate problem was never really developed beyond plot device, and Jordan’s determination to catch the killer seemed only matched by her determination to find out whether the profiler had a girlfriend. Having said all of that, I was still involved right up to the end, and I do recognize that it must have felt very modern and unusual when it was published in the early 1990s.