Fever of the Bone (Tony Hill/Carol Jordan, #6) by Val McDermid

SUMMARY REVIEW Another excellent thriller featuring Tony Hill & Carol Jordan solving crimes and catching serial killers in the north of England. Fever of the Bone is the sixth entry in Val McDermid’s police procedural/murder mystery series starring DCI Carol Jordan and psychologist profiler Tony Hill. I love the way McDermid can quickly place the reader into a scene to sympathize with a character, even if we know that person will probably become the next victim of a sordid serial killer. She uses this to great effect to produce narrative tension and provide suspense to the reader. Is this person going to become the next victim? Or will they survive? To me, this is a clear example of the author not taking advantage of the too-easy trope of putting their detective in harm's way as a tool for causing the reader to be invested in what happens. McDermid is a master, she has a whole lotta other tricks up her sleeve! In Fever of the Bone the relationship between Jordan and Hill is as complicated as ever. This time the crime is not as gruesome as McDermid’s typically horrific fare but the hunt for the killer is as gripping as ever. Teenagers are being stalked online and then abducted, drugged, suffocated and sexually mutilated. McDermid lets us experience the thoughts and hopes of several of the kids before they meet the killer, and this is extremely effective at engrossing the reader. As with most murder mystery/police procedural series that have recurring characters, part of the enjoyment of the book is not only reading how (or whether) they will catch the culprit, but learning more about these characters and seeing what new developments happen to them and how they react to them as time goes by and the events in subsequent books occur. In the case of Carol Jordan, she has a new boss who is skeptical that her specialized team is worth the extra money it takes to work with a specialized profiler like Dr. Tony Hill. And he’s not sure the difficult (often cold) cases they solve are worth the effort it takes. For Tony, he’s still coming to terms with the fact that he has received a huge inheritance from a father he thought had abandoned him to the abuse and deprivations of his psychopathic mother. There’s also some interesting developments with the important secondary characters in the series. In Fever of the Bone, some clarity is provided about the romantic tension between Carol and Tony, which is refreshing (and somewhat surprising, considering it has previously been a feature of the narrative heft of the books). Overall, Fever of the Bone is a median entry in this always excellent series featuring Tony Hill & Carol Jordan solving crimes and catching serial killers in the north of England. This time I was able to guess some of the connections between the crimes but I didn’t figure out the eventual perpetrator before Tony, but there definitely were enough clues to do so. I can’t wait to see what happens next in these books, especially since in The Retribution the series’ most notorious villain will play a prominent role!

Title: Fever of the Bone.
Author: Val McDermid.
Paperback: 432 pages.
Publisher: Little, Brown.
Date Published: 2009.
Date Read: August 1, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.