Synopses & Reviews
Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezlng day in December, another child goes missing: thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her town, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome which reverberates through the years.
Decades later he finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when the book is poised for publication, Bennett unaccountably tries to pull the plug. He has new information which he refuses to divulge, new information that threatens the very foundations of his existence. Catherine is forced to re-investigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down.
A Greek tragedy in modern England, A Place of Execution is a taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multi-layered narrative that turns expectations on their head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know. A Place of Execution is winner of the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a 2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.
Review
"Val McDermid's elegiac study of a henious crime and its aftermath, is very much in the (P.D.) Jamesian mode, both in its inventive use of devices of detection and its mournful view of murder as a moral reckoning." (New York Times Book Review)
Review
"A novel about a murder in which the police find the culprit but not the body--a circumstance rich in the stuff of which page turners are made...McDermid...generates curiousity and, finally, whiplash surprise." (Atlantic Monthly)
Review
"Val McDermid's A Place of Execution (HarperCollins, £6.99 pbk), about a murder that took place a good many years ago and its repercussions in the present, is one of the best detective stories I've read." (Saturday's Daily Telegraph's Summer Reading feature:
Ruth Rendell)
Review
"One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever."--
Newsday"Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish."--Wall Street Journal
"Val McDemid's best work to date."--Times Literary Supplement
Review
"One of the most ingenious mystery novels ever."--
Newsday"Inventivly conceived and wonderfully written...A marvel from start to finish."--Wall Street Journal
"Val McDemid's best work to date."--Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
One of the most acclaimed novels of suspense of our time, A Place of Execution won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was hailed by critics as “a marvel from start to finish” (The Wall Street Journal) and “a modern masterpiece” (The Denver Post).
Synopsis
Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezlng day in December, another child goes missing: thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her town, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome which reverberates through the years.
Decades later he finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when the book is poised for publication, Bennett unaccountably tries to pull the plug. He has new information which he refuses to divulge, new information that threatens the very foundations of his existence. Catherine is forced to re-investigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down.
A Greek tragedy in modern England, A Place of Execution is a taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multi-layered narrative that turns expectations on their head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know. A Place of Execution is a 2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.
About the Author
Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years and is now a full-time writer and lives in South Manchester. In 1995, she won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year.