Val McDermid: A Place of Execution

[bibliogramma]

I have finally gotten around to reading my first novel by Val McDermid, A Place of Execution, and it lived up to all the praise I've read concerning her work. Well-written, great characterisation, captivating plot, excellent balance of foreshadowing/seeding of pointers to the final revelation - everything done just right. I started reading it last night, and I could not put it down, but rather read all night and finished around dawn.

It is one of those books where for one reason or another, an old crime is revisited with unexpected results. The first (and longest) part of the novel is set in 1963, in the isolated village of Scardale, England - barely twelve homes plus the manor where the local landowner lives - where a young girl, Alison Carter, the thirteen-year-old stepdaughter of the new incumbent of the manor, Phillip Hawkin, is missing. For recently promoted DI George Bennett, this is his first big case - and he's determined to solve it. The narrative follows the case through all the dead ends and new developments of investigation, through to an arrest, trial and conviction for rape and murder - even though the body of Alison Carter is never found.

Thirty-five years later, journalist Catherine Heathcote, who grew up near Scardale and remembers Alison Carter, meets press liaison officer Paul Bennett - George's son - in Brussels, and learns that his girlfriend's sister, Janis Wainwright, now lives in the old manor house in Scardale. The co-incidental meeting leads to a decision to interview George Bennett and write a book about the case - but what she and Bennett discover changes everything they thought they knew about the disappearance of Alison Carter.