Read in the beautiful surroundings of the La Palma Princess Hotel(highly recommended) this grisly tale didn't fit with the sunshine and the blue skies but it was very good.

I've never read anything by McDermid before, I'm not a massive fan of crime books. Apart from J.K Rowling's books, I would never buy one. But I am given lots and this one completely sucked me in.

However I could see it falling apart when Tony moved into the same apartment block as Carol, big rookie mistake. Even though she knew she was being watched, she didn't think about that!?

I didn't know about what the Nazi's did to their own people, who were not considered "normal". That is something I would like to know more about and I thought it was very clever for McDermid to tie that in with the murders although how Tony jumped to that conclusion is beyond me.

If your looking for an exciting crime read, this is the one for you. I will look out for more books by McDermid.

Carol, an inspector in Britian, is approached by superiors with an offer she can't refuse - join them in a shady undercover sting, designed to bring down a bad guy they've been after. The reward - she can write her own ticket in her career.

She enlists Tony, who's been seeing someone for months, to help her prepare for her role as someone else. Throw in police from Germany and the Netherlands, and a psycho-killer dispatching psychologists, and you have an entertaining yarn.

Not quite as satisfying as previous instalments this is the story of Carol Jordan working undercover and Tony Hill trying to work out who killed some women close by. The two of them are a little too caught up in themselves to be believable as a working team and not as a pair of people bent on self-destruction.

I didn't get as caught by the story as by previous I think the two parallel stories fell a little flat occasionally.

At her best, McDermid can enthral me with her crime fiction, but I find her work very uneven and, while diverting enough, this novel was not amongst the best of hers I've read.

Realism is never one of McDermid's core strengths, but when reading this novel, I didn't so much have to willingly suspend my disbelief as hang draw and quarter it. There's the usual problem that Tony's "incredible psychological insights" seem to amount to a couple of superficial deductions that a five-year-old could have drawn, a couple of findings that are down to plain detective work, not psychology, at all (e.g. the knot thing) and then some highly specific findings that come from nowhere. But, added to that, we have supposedly crack law enforcement teams and elite gangsters all behaving like the Keystone bleeding Kops, making basic schoolchild errors left, right and centre and exposing themselves to risk by insisting on performing menial tasks themselves that in RL would have been left to a minion at the bottom of the pile. And the whole premise of the covert operation which Carol is involved in starts off incredibly far-fetched and then breaks ever more stratospheric new heights of implausibility as the novel progresses.

The gangster theme in this book seemed to me to be, not only unconvincingly drawn, but pretty uninteresting.

One thing I dislike about McDermid is a tendency to include graphic acts of violence (and especially sexual violence) merely for titillating, sensationalist purposes. The second of the two brutal rapes in this book seemed to me especially unnecessary and included only to artificially prelong the dynamic between two characters well past its sell-by date.

On the plus side, though, the book was very readable - no mean feat, given that McDermid had, as always, included scenes from the murderer's perspective from the start, so had deliberately denied herself the easy route to suspense of a whodunnit. I also like the main characters and their relationship, although I think that has been better explored in other books of the series.