The Mermaids Singing

⚖The case for it

Tony Hill is a closeted, socially awkward profiler and Carol Jordan is a detective inspector who does not much believe in profiling, and readers say the friction between them carries the book past its own case. The procedure is researched rather than decorative, showing how a profile actually gets assembled out of evidence. Landlines and legwork only, which gives the investigation a shape a modern procedural cannot have. McDermid keeps the sentences lean under extreme material, and readers say “every sentence says something significant.” The last stretch is the strongest. “This is not your common or garden police procedural.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The torture is the complaint, held on the page well past what the story needs, and readers admit the killer’s diary sections were “too graphic and so I skipped those.” One puts it simply: “I just don’t want those images in my head.” Genre veterans work the case out early, which flattens the back half. The 1995 attitudes from minor police characters have dated. One critic finds the plotting shows its hand before the investigators catch up. And there is “nothing in the book at all that relates to either mermaids” or singing.

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings