Product Description

A clinically efficient killer is murdering psychologists on the Continent. Psychological profiler Dr Tony Hill is drafted onto the case. DCI Carol Jordan is en route to Berlin too, on a covert police operation. Both of them have to explore a past of atrocities and a present-day full of cruelty.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #229958 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 431 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Val McDermid just gets better and better. The Last Temptation is intelligent about undercover police work and psychological profiling as well as moving on the human cost to the people who have to do society's dirty work.

We are back with profiler Tony Hills and super-competent cop Carol, who we met in The Mermaids Singing and The Wire in the Blood. The couple's past experiences have created a bond between them as well as a certain inability to bear the sight of each other. They are brought back into co-operation by the needs of the job in its European dimension. Tony is persuaded to help track a European killer who drowns and mutilates psychologists, while Carol is working undercover to trap a drug trafficker whose dead lover spookily resembles her.

As always, McDermid writes brilliant criminals. She adds that deadening of sympathy which makes horror possible. Both aristocratic gangster Tadeusz and vengeful psychotic Mann have their reasons for being who they are, doing what they do. McDermid makes us care that her detectives succeed and survive just that little bit more than we care for her villains to escape. She writes excellent thrillers simply because she has a journalist's eye for both sides of each case. --Roz Kaveney

Review
'McDermid's capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing' Marcel Berlins, The Times Praise for Killing the Shadows: 'Good pace, enough blood to make us feel that murder is far from cold and clinical, and, best of all, characters you believe in' Maeve Binchy, Mail on Sunday 'The plotting is impeccable, the atmosphere palpable, and I doubt that it will be surpassed this year' Graham Caveney, Sunday Express

Marcel Berlins, The Times
‘A scary, disturbing, exciting and atmospheric white-knuckle read’

Customer Reviews

The Hunters Become The Prey
We are all Europeans now, but that does not stop cross boundary suspicion among police forces when a serial killer is using the waterways of Germany and the Netherlands to target his victims. At the same time Carol Jordan is cajoled into going underground to trap a particularly nasty trafficker in drugs and illegal immegrants, with the carrot of a top European job if she succeeds.

How these two disperate stories are woven together is the genius of Val McDermid, her writing getting stronger by the book. This is the third Tony Hill/Carol Jordan book and, with the Wire in the Blood soon to be on our TV screens, she is soon to be catapulted into Rankine status.

What McDermid brings is a truly gruesome modus operendi, matched by a credible pyschological reason for the disturbed mind behind it. She creates not monsters, but damaged characters who are all the more scary for it.

Tony Hill and Carol Jordan use professional detachment to avoid intimacy; their struggle against their emotions rumbles like a volcano beneath the major plot lines. The closer they get together the more they put themselves at risk. The risk is not just that they might have to reveal vulnerable aspects to one another, but that this "weakness" will be exploited by some very nasty characters indeed.

Powerful, dark and gripping, The Last Temptation is not for the nervous. It will make you think and it will lose you sleep.

Good - but not quite great
There is just something missing to make this a great book but it is a riveting read and the description of the policework in Holland and Germany was fascinating. There is the feeling that the author suddenly tired of the book and it ends rather abruptly and it is difficult to believe that a seasoned policewoman would make such an elementary mistake. That being said it is a book which is difficult to put down and in Tony Hill we have a character who is flawed in a way which is not usual in this genre (i.e. the failed marriage, workaholic, borderline alcoholic cliché). I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading the next, it will be interesting to see if the author will come back to Hill an Jordan and where they can go from here.

Good, but not her best.
I can assure one of the previous reviewsers that Val MCDermid is definitely not an over-hyped novelist. Some of her previous books have been absolutely stunners. Absolute stunners. (I am thinking in particular of The Mermaids Singing, the Wire in the Blood, A Place of Execution, and the sublime Killing the Shadows.) However, this one does not compare as well as some of the others.

Firstly, the undercover side was all well and good, but it dominated the plot far too much. and as a result what was actually a really decent premise of a serial killer plot was left as a secondary plot and remained slightly underdevloped. I simply did not care to read a novel dominated by Carol going under cover. It wasn't that it wasn't interesting, it was just that i would really have preferred (as i think another reviewer has said) much more concentration on the serial killer aspect. I would rather have had the entire book about the serial killer, as it had superb possibility and potential, but she failed to bring it out. Actually, i am very disappointed. I was expecting a lot more. A tense serial killer thriller, when instead i got a novel about someone going undercover to catch an underdeveloped and not at all menacing villain. It's a great shame. had she concentrated a lot more on the other aspect of the plot, then this book may well have turned out as one of her best. And even though i am extremely disappointed, i can still say that a disappointing Val McDermid book is still much better than anything else currently on the market. Hence the four stars.