Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 22, 2013

Carol Jordan, unemployed and burdened by her sense of guilt for her brother's death, is getting her life back together (or not) by restoring the barn in which her brother was murdered and by caring for a new dog. Paula McIntyre, a member of Jordan's Major Incident Team with the Bradfield Metropolitan Police before it was broken apart, is newly promoted to Detective Sergeant. Paula would like to investigate the disappearance of Bev McAndrew, whose 14-year-old son is disturbed that she didn't come home, but Paula's new DCI puts her to work on a brutal homicide instead. Paula nonetheless devotes herself to investigating McAndrew's disappearance because disobeying their bosses is standard procedure for fictional police detectives. Soon enough, we learn that a serial killer is kidnapping, tormenting, and killing women who happen to look like Carol. Eventually the evidence points to an unlikely suspect, and it is up to Paula to determine whether that series regular is innocent or guilty.

Val McDermid understands the tendency of police detectives to focus their tunnel vision on the first suspect they encounter, working thereafter to prove that suspect's guilt rather than continuing an open-minded investigation. She also recognizes the tendency of police officers to believe that everyone is entitled to a defense except the suspects they arrest, who are by definition guilty scum undeserving of a presumption of innocence. Paula's obnoxious DCI, who succumbs to both those tendencies, is the novel's most realistic character.

Point of view rotates through the cast of characters, including various victims of the serial killer. One of the more prominent characters is Carol's former love interest, Tony Hill, a psychologist who doubles as a profiler. Like most fictional profilers, Tony has analytical powers that border on the psychic. He is also a good friend of Paula, who is tedious in her insistence that she is soooo very compassionate and cares soooo much about victims, unlike all the people who make her soooo angry because they have soooo little compassion. Both Tony and Paula are obnoxiously self-aggrandizing.

Carol's personality is similar to Paula's except that she's even more ridiculously judgmental. Carol is tedious in her insistence that the police are always pure of heart and that criminals are always monsters. That's bad enough, but she's just as harsh when it comes to judging her friends. Sometimes there's value in making a protagonist disagreeable, but I found little value in reading about Carol, in part because much of her anger seems artificial, a contrivance that allows Carol to make deep and meaningful adjustments in her thinking before the novel is over, leaving her fans smiling because Carol once again becomes the justice-craving person her fans want her to be. It's just too obvious to be compelling drama, and in any event, she's still a shallow binary thinker at the novel's end.

McDermid's bad guys are consistent with Carol's binary view of the world. There is no nuance in McDermid's cartoonish depiction of purely evil villains. Her descriptions of the serial killer's formative years are both unimaginative and unconvincing.

Characters frequently interrupt the plot to talk about their failed romances or their relationship anxiety or to "listen to each other's pain." They're so busy being a support group for each other that it's amazing they have time to do any police work. The conversations are a dull drag on the novel's momentum.

The plot hinges on too many unlikely coincidences. Coincidences happen all the time so I'm willing to give writers the benefit of their use, but when they start to pile up, the plot loses its credibility. The ending is much too tidy, and the novel loses credibility points there, as well. Still, the story moves quickly and McDermid's unblemished prose style is easy to read. The novel held my attention despite its unlikable characters and unconvincing plot. Series fans will no doubt like Cross and Burn more than I did.

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