Val McDermid - The Mermaids Singing

Three and a half stars. Pretty good.

I found this a bit hard to get into at first--that main characters of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan took a while to come together for me--but after the half-way mark, things really started moving. By present-day standards The Mermaids Singing is a fairly predictable psych profiling/serial killer thriller, but the way McDermid interweaves the strands of the investigation together with the characters' personal lives is entertaining. It's very clearly the beginning of a series, and based on this first episode I'll certainly be reading more McDermid in the future.