I am a bit late to the Val McDermid party but have been a fan of the tv series. It's interesting to note that the tv series departs significantly from the books in terms of storylines but not from character - Hermione Norris' Carol Jordan and Robson Green's Tony Hill are very close to the written characters.

This is the second in the series. After the disastrous dénoument of [b:The Mermaids Singing|459386|The Mermaids Singing (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #1)|Val McDermid|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389270695s/459386.jpg|88269] Carol Jordan has been promoted to DCI and relocated to East Yorkshire. She's inherited a squad who are resentful of her as an outsider, making it hard to get their buy-in on investigating what she believes is serial arson.

Meanwhile, Tony Hill has been given the go-ahead to create a National Profiling Taskforce. Sharing office space with the plods in Leeds (who are none too happy to have witch-doctors on their patch) he sets about training his baby profilers.

As an exercise, the trainees are assigned a series of missing persons cases, all involving young girls with a certain, shall we say, insouciant look. One super keen young profiler thinks she's found a real-life cluster of serial killer victims, and it all hits off from there. Carol gets drawn in as she seeks Tony's help profiling her arsonist, and is soon drawn in to his protegé's controversial theory.

No more because SPOILERS! ( )

(1997)Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find...Jacko Vance is handsome and talented, rich and famous--a notorious charmer with the power to seduce...and the will to destroy. No one can believe what he's capable of. No one can imagine what he's already done. And no one can fathom what he's about to do next. Until one of Hill's students is murdered--the first move in a sick and violent game for three players. Now, of all the killers Hill and Jordan have hunted, none has been so ruthless, so terrifyingly clever, and so brilliantly elusive as the killer who's hunting them.We know Vance is the killer, the hook is can Tony & Carol obtain enough evidence to prove it when everybody in the country considers Vance a hero. When he kills one of Tony's team who pursues her theory that Vance is guilty, then Tony makes it personal to catch the guy. He does but only after the latest victim dies in Vance's underground bomb shelter. Right up to the end, Vance is scheming on how to get away with everything. Not a tidy ending, but life isn't tidy.

Docenas de chicas adolescentes han desaparecido por todo el país. No hay conexión aparente entre ellas, se trata tan sólo de chicas que huyeron de casa y tuvieron mala suerte. ¿O puede que sí haya algo que conecta todos esos casos, un patrón oculto, un asesino en la sombra?
El doctor Tony Hill, experto en trazar perfiles criminales, pone en marcha a su equipo y, con la ayuda de Carol Jordan, empiezan a indagar. Alguien aventura una teoría que parece descabellada y provoca incredulidad. Pero cuando uno de los pupilos de Hill es asesinado y mutilado, lo descabellado parece empezar a cobrar sentido, porque la persona más normal y encantadora del mundo puede ser un criminal perturbado...

Tony Hill Book 2

Doing a slow re-read of the series alternating with the newer ones, I enjoyed this more than I expected. My memory was of not liking this at all however many years ago, and I'm not entirely sure why. The fate of Shaz Bowman disturbed me at the time (and not in the way it was supposed to) but being ready for it this time helped. The ending is a bit too open, particularly as the suggested payoff takes until four books later for it to occur. I remember dreading that suggested immediate follow-up so I suppose this time around I knew it wasn't going to happen and that gave me more of a sense of closure, however temporary. ( )