Serial killer stalks teens in `Fever of the Bone'

Fever of the Bone" (HarperCollins, $14.99), by Val McDermid: When serial crime fiction is done well, readers can drop into any installment and within a few chapters, understand nearly everything about the primary characters and their relationship with one another.

And so it is with Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, of which "Fever of the Bone" is the sixth book. (Readers unfamiliar with the series might know the BBC's "Wire in the Blood," which is based on these novels.)
Hill is a brilliant criminal profiler, if a little socially inept. He knows what's expected of him in conversation and interpersonal relationships, but he isn't always able to give it. This hasn't harmed either his working or personal relationship with Detective Chief Inspector Jordan, who heads up a special investigative team with the Bradfield Police. There's a hint of sexual tension between Hill and Jordan, but it skims the surface of a deeper connection between them.

In "Fever of the Bone" (the title, as with the other Hill/Jordan books, comes from a T.S. Eliot poem), McDermid takes what is by now a fairly familiar (and possibly tired) plot: an Internet predator preying on teenagers — and gives it a good yank.

This time around, a serial killer is using a Facebook/MySpace-like social network called RigMarole (it's both amusing and plausible that Rig is what appears after Facebook's popularity wanes) to pick out a selection of teenagers who don't seem to have any connection to one another — they live in different cities, don't know each other, are different ages and sexes. Yet they're all approached in similar ways by someone claiming to know their big secret, and they're all murdered and mutilated in the same way.

McDermid builds suspense in a few delicious ways. She introduces the victims before they are taken, so readers learn what their family life is like, what they desire and by what means their killer reaches out to them.
These scenes are scattered throughout the book, placed so expertly that just when readers have been lulled into a nice stretch of solid detective work, there's a new kid, and the race to stop another murder begins afresh. Watching Jordan's team catch up with events, done both with high-tech computer wizardry and old-school footwork, is riveting.

Most notably, there is no sort of serial-killer internal monologue, save for the somewhat perplexing brief prologue that will, of course, make sense as the mystery unfolds. Nor do readers witness any crime scene or potential target from the killer's perspective. Readers know only what Hill, Jordan and the police force in other districts find out, and it's both surprising and refreshing in the midst of all the mysteries that do spend time in their villains' heads to note how effective McDermid's approach is in ramping up tension.