CASE IN WHICH FEMINISM SOLVES THE CRIME AND MISOGYNY TRAPS THE KILLER

At its best, crime fiction represents one of the most sensitive of cultural barometers, an index to our anxieties. Splinter The Silence, Mcdermid’s 29th book and ninth featuring psychological profiler Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan does just that.

It is swiftly plotted and strongly characterised – thankfully, one never feels that Mcdermid is writing Robson Green rather than Tony Hill – and makes some palpable hits about the suppurating nastiness of online abuse. Mcdermid can always make you wince, but she does so by being forensic about the rottenness of human nature rather than through gore. They are, in a strange way, very Calvinist crime novels. Depravity is normality. Following on from the events of The Retribution and Cross And Burn, where Jordan left the force and Hill was the suspect in a murder enquiry, the protagonists’ relationship is still stretched and precarious.

Things are spiralling out of control for Jordan, especially after she is arrested for drink-driving. Hill attempts to make her deal with her issues with alcohol, in part by trying to involve her in his beloved computer games, and in part by kindling her curiosity. A number of high-profile feminist writers and campaigners have supposedly been driven to commit suicide after being subjected to horrendous trolling. But they did not show the signs consistent with an individual thinking of taking their BY VAL MCDERMID