Beneath The Bleeding by Val McDermid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As I said in an another review, I think my taste for detective fiction is becoming jaded. I’m also experiencing this in TV fiction – Silent Witness is becoming very ‘samey’ and the issues about whether the police and CSOs do the detecting or whether the MEs do it is a major bone of contention for me. Still, enough post mortems for now, and back to the book at hand.
McDermid is the Queen of UK crime fiction writers, and this is a good read. However, it’s necessary for a reader to suspend disbelief at times in a novel. In this work, I found that suspension failed me on a couple of occasions – some aspects of the plot were too hard to believe and did not knit well.
Did I feel I’d learned something by reading it? No.
Was the plot outstandingly memorable for me? No.
I’m always wary of series characters, and this book is claimed to be #5 in the series. As an author myself, I’m painfully aware of the temptation to serialise (and guilty of it too). There again, I would that I were 10% as successful as McDermid, James Patterson and other serialisers.
