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Val McDermid

Killing the Shadows MP3 CD – Unabridged, January 27, 2015

by Val McDermid (Author), Vari Sylvester (Reader)

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A killer is on the loose, blurring the line between fact and fiction. His prey—the writers of crime novels who have turned psychological profilers into the heroes of the nineties. But this killer is like no other. His bloodlust shatters all the conventional wisdom surrounding the motives and mechanics of how serial killers operate. And for one woman, the desperate hunt to uncover his identity becomes a matter of life and death.

Professor Fiona Cameron is an academic psychologist who uses computer technology to help police forces track serial offenders. She used to help the Met, but vowed never to work for them again when they went against her advice and badly screwed up an investigation as a consequence. Still smarting from the experience, she's working a case in Toledo when her lover, thriller writer Kit Martin, tells her a fellow crime novelist has been murdered. It's not her case, but Fiona can't help taking an interest.

Which is just as well, because before too long the killer strikes again. And again. And Fiona is caught up in a race against time, not only to save a life, but to bring herself redemption, both personal and professional.

Rich in atmosphere, Killing the Shadows uses the backdrops of city and country to create an air of threatening menace, culminating in a tense confrontation between hunter and hunted, a confrontation that can have only one outcome.

Language

English
Publisher

Brilliance Audio
Publication date

January 27, 2015
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6.5 x 0.63 x 5.5 inches
ISBN-10

1501233173
ISBN-13

978-1501233173
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About the Author

One of Britain's most popular authors of contemporary crime fiction, Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community, read English at Oxford, then returned to Scotland to work as a journalist. She was National Bureau Chief on a national Sunday tabloid before quitting in 1991 to become a full-time novelist.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (January 27, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501233173
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501233173
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.63 x 5.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #8,429,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40,723 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #44,699 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #164,950 in Suspense Thrillers

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4.2 5,746 ratings

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Val McDermid

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Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

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L. L. Golden

Who’s killing the writers of thrillers?

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2021

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Val McDermid’s come up with another winner, a tense, meta-reference tale of cops, killers, profilers and the novelists who write about them. The central figure is an unusual kind of profiler: she works with locations and statistics instead of motives and unresolved conflicts. Still, it’s a new way of looking at evidence and a fascinating idea. The cops respect her work and her crime-novelist partner makes living wonderful. But when his circle of friends and peers start dying like the victims in their books, no one is a happy camper. And no one is safe until the bad guys get caught.

If you don’t know McDermid’s work, this could be a fun introduction. And if you do, this will keep you reading past bedtime. Enjoy!

3 people found this helpful

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D. R. Johnson

Another one hit out of the park!

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2021

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Val McDermid has the raw talent honed by experience, the originality, the complexity, and the skill possessed by very, very few authors in this genre. Even after writing so many wildly successful novels, she still writes with the exuberance of a novice writer hungry for her first bestseller. With her vivid description of the wild and rugged environment her main character traverses, she takes the reader right along with her. But be forewarned, you’re in for a very arduous journey with even more villains than usual!

3 people found this helpful

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John R. Lindermuth

A Thrilling Ride

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2009

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A serial killer is stalking and executing thriller writers in manners scripted in their novels.

Psychologist Fiona Campbell is drawn into the case when her lover Kit Martin is targeted as a potential victim.

Campbell is a psychologist who uses computer technology to help law enforcement in locating offenders through crime linkage and geographical profiling. She has sworn never to work again with the Metropolitan police after they ignored her advice and messed up an investigation. This has created a rift between her and longtime friend, Detective Superintendent Steve Preston. This breach increases with dramatic results when Preston fails to give adequate support to Fiona's fears.

The novel has a number of subplots which initially appear to be distractions. Yet nothing is ever quite as it seems in a McDermid thriller. She neatly ties everything together with compelling surprises and plot twists.

An enjoyable, if nail-biting, ride.

2 people found this helpful

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quilter71

Twists and Turns

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2021

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Try thinking about a suspect’s motives when you don’t know who the suspect is! Then try to locate said suspect when he could be in three or four countries. Then find out he has a list of people he wants to kill. Think you could find him? Use your thinking cap, dear reader.

One person found this helpful

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Mr. J. Baillie

Brilliance sustained and enhanced

Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2001

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Val McD has surpassed the excellent Place of Execution with this superbly written work.Psychologist Dr Fiona Cameron goes to investigate a serial killer in Toledo, Spain and feels she has left behind the bitter taste from her last case for London`s Metropolitan Police in which they went against her advice and the murder of a young London woman remains unsolved.On return to England ,another serial killer starts his rampage of gruesome murder,targeting crime novelists and re-enacting their deaths in the same way of a victim from each of their books .
Dr Cameron has more than a vested interest as her lover ,Kit Martin is a crime writer and may be on the hitman`s list.With the case in London still open,the Toledo case unsolved and a serial killer targeting mystery writers ,on the rampage,Dr Cameron has a personal and professional crisis which could crossroads at any time.
Intricate,fast paced,intelligent and with more twists than a mountain stream,this is a great bet for another Edgar nomination and a must read for all true fans of modern crime thrillers.

4 people found this helpful

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Enrique F. Bird

A superb product from a top contemporary mystery writer.

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2007

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This is as satisfying a modern mystery as I have read in years. The basic plot description reads as a serial killer of serial killer thriller writers. I will add to this that Ms. Mc Dermid gices us in 1 book: a) 3 seprarate serial killer investigation in varying degrees of detail and all interesting; b) several intelligent detectives, none of them Lestrade-ish or tokenish; c) interesting victims; d) a very charismatic heroine in all senses; e) red herrings in the classic tradition, as well as a surprising main villain. Just read this one; you will not be dissapointed.

7 people found this helpful

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Leni

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2021

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So disappointed. I’ve read all of the Karen Pirie series and enjoyed every single one. But this book well it was so very disappointing. Prose was extremely dry, couldn’t invest in the “heroine” an unlike other books couldn’t get that feeling of “can’t wait to find out who did it.” I struggled and stopped about a third of the way.

One person found this helpful

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Cookie

Makes so much sense

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2020

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Everything in this books adds up perfectly, elegantly, and as always with McDermid, worth the time to read the book.

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la gallina Pula

Floja

Reviewed in Spain on July 29, 2021

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Es la primera vez que termino una novela de la autora que no me ha gustado. Las reacciones del personaje principal, tal opuestas entre sí, hacen que su actuación a lo largo de la novela sea poco creíble. Como la historia en sí, con demasiados puntos de atención que rompen la atención y no sepas nunca a donde conducen.

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LS

gripping until the end

Reviewed in Germany on August 5, 2013

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Entertaining with lots of attention to detail. Hard to put own from halfway through. Momentum increases the final two chapters. Great holiday reading.

Mlle K. Burns

Excéllent

Reviewed in France on July 31, 2012

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L'histoire d'un profiler qui aide la police à trouver des "serial killers" ... il y a plusieurs histoires en même temps, qui sont finalement tous reliés à la fin !!!

Excéllent livre !!!!!

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Kate Hopkins

Nasty and Unbelievable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 19, 2019

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This is my second bad Val McDermid experience - an overlong stand-alone novel long on gore and short on plausibility or psychological analysis - even though the heroine is a police psychologist. The plot essentially deals with three crimes in which said police psychologist, Fiona Cameron, has been or is on the investigative team: the murder of a woman on Hampstead Heath (the police got the wrong man through ignoring Fiona's advice), a series of murders committed in Toledo, Spain, by someone who seems to have a vendetta against the tourist trade, and another series of murders committed by some lunatic who appears to have a hatred of thriller writers who write about serial killers, and is slowly picking them off, killing each in a way that features in one of their novels. This is particularly bad news for Fiona, whose partner is - wait for it - a thriller writer specializing in gory novels about serial killers.

It's all wildly over the top and not only stomach churning but profoundly irritating. The murders - and the equivalent description in the writers' novels - are described in loathsome detail, as though McDermid's getting a lot of pleasure purely from describing horrible acts. So extreme is the gore that it begins to seem more like one of the more awful Road Dahl children's books that real life. The killer's 'revenge motif' is so unbelievable that it's laughable - in fact, when I recounted the plot of the novel to my boyfriend, he assumed the book was a black farce! The story is also painfully slow, the police unconvincingly stupid, and McDermid struggles to link the Spanish killings to the rest of the plot. And the baddie is ludicrously easy to spot - I'd worked out who it was by about Page 40.

It doesn't help that a fair amount of the characters are so badly drawn. Despite Fiona's career, no real effort is made to explain why the serial killer does what they do. All the thriller writers bar perhaps Jane are caricatures - gym-obsessed Andy, cosmetic-surgery obsessed Georgia, and Kit, who spends his days writing about the most horrible crimes (including someone draining a victim of their blood to paint murals) and his evenings cooking Fiona gourmet dinners. The murderer is nasty without being interesting, the police curiously obtuse. Fiona and her friend Caroline are really the only interesting characters, and even they could do with more depth. This means that the book rapidly gets very dull - we don't have much invested in the characters and so can't care what happens to them. I have to confess I gave up round about Page 300 realizing I had 300 pages still to go and just skim-read the rest - in which the plot seemed to get sillier and sillier, including an Errol Flynn-like stunt for the heroine in the final section. Was McDermid, like Bernice Rubens with 'Mother Russia', deliberately writing a bad book tongue-in-cheek to see if anyone noticed?

The novel's only real saving graces were some lovely descriptions of Toledo and some sympathetic writing about how Fiona became a police psychologist following the death of her sister. But this wasn't enough to make it any more than an irritating read. Since finishing it I've read one of the Karen Pirie novels and can't believe that the same writer wrote this. But I guess if you turn out as many novels as Val McDermid does you're bound to have the odd off day.

26 people found this helpful

John Milton

Killing time with Killing the Shadows

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2012

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Following the news of the planned big screen adaptation of award-winning author Val McDermid's Killing the Shadows, I picked up the source material.

I've never sampled McDermid's work but she is hailed as one of the Queens of UK crime fiction with several of her novels already having been adapted into the successful ITV crime drama Wire In The Blood, which starred Robson Greene, Hermione Norris and Simone Lahbib.

From here, let me highlight to you that this is not horror. In my opinion, Killing the Shadows is firmly in thriller country and I'm sure that will appeal to many readers. So, as identified by the synopsis, we've got a book here that has as its main focus a serial killer... killing the writers of serial killer novels; and a psychologist as the protagonist of this conventional thriller.

McDermid's characters are well developed and very human, as one would expect with an author of her popularity who has at the heart of her subject matter the study of the fallacies of the human condition.

I did enjoy the stylistic mechanism employed by McDermid where she inserted chapters of the fictional writers' work into the novel, illustrating how her own killer chooses to despatch the writers since he utilises the method of the fictional writers' killers to murder them... if that makes sense!

I find a number of aspects of this novel difficult to deal with, such as the inflexibility and unwillingness of the police to acknowledge the possibility of a serial killer in the face of a rising body count. Additionally, what could perhaps be best described as the wilful blindness of the protagonist, despite the mounting evidence coupled with her own intellect, seems ridiculous. However, this may well be tainted by my own position as a reader in possession of more of the facts than Fiona Cameron.

For me, the most interesting interlude came when Cameron was requested to advise on a serial killer in Toledo, Spain, who was leaving his victims strewn across sites of historical interest in the city and yes, it cannot be argued that McDermid has created a very complete thriller; and I acknowledge that this review may seem a little dry but on a subjective basis, I just didn't find it very satisfying and felt that it was very much a by the numbers affair.

Overall, I found Killing the Shadows to be a very tame, predictable read which will undoubtedly translate well to the big screen and appeal to a mainstream audience.

One person found this helpful

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