Val McDermid, The Torment of Others

Derek Tyler has been in a mental institution for two years, locked away after confessing to a string of savage crimes, the ritual mutilation and murder of four prostitutes. Derek's not a bright guy, but his crimes were meticulously planned: the Voice, after all, had given him very precise instructions. Elevated by his acts of sadism, Derek was changed from one of life's losers to a somebody whose crimes could terrorize a community and stump the police, at least for a while. But two years on, with Derek safely behind the bars of his asylum, it's happening again: prostitutes are being killed in precisely the same way, grisly details that had never been released to the public replicated in a gory reprise of the earlier murders. And the Voice is commanding a new killer.

The elite major incident squad investigating the killings has brought in Britain's top psychological profiler to consult on the case, but Dr. Tony Hill is, frankly, at a loss. There is no doubt that Derek Tyler was guilty of the first crimes, and a copycat killer would need inside information about the Tyler murders to reenact them. More problematic is that no one else would want to reenact the murders, at least not for the purpose of satisfying their own sexual fantasies. As Dr. Hill repeatedly insists, no two people committing sexually motivated homicides will derive satisfaction from the same complex of details—how their victims are bound, how they are tortured, how they are killed.

While Tony Hill tries to enter the mind of the maniac cleaning up Bradfield's red-light district, the city's police department, under the leadership of DCI Carol Jordan, investigates the crime by more traditional means—poring through paperwork, interrogating everyone working and living in the seedy area in which the crimes took place, and planting an undercover policewoman among the city's vulnerable working girls.

Val McDermid's The Torment of Others, the fourth book in her series featuring profiler Tony Hill, is a solid police procedural and simply a very good read: well-written, with likable but flawed good guys, creepy bad guys, and a plot that will keep you guessing until Tony himself starts putting the pieces together. And once he does that, some 60 pages from the book's close, readers will be hard-pressed indeed to put this one down.