Book review: Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid the latest Carol Jordan/ Tony Hill book. Release date 27th August 2015

As always with Val McDermid's  Carol Jordan/Tony Hill series ,as a reader we must be prepared to expect the unexpected and Splinter The Silence is no exception to this rule.  With an innovative new serial killer that the police have yet to identify as a serial killer the plot is intriguing and of course a dream adversary for Tony Hill to get his teeth into and a crusade for carol to relaunch her career with.  


A lovely mix of the cerebral and the down and dirty, topical and thought provoking.  the only bad thing about reading a

Val McDermid book is that sooner or later (usually sooner) your going to get to the end and have to put the book down.  Splinter the Silence is all about the team being back and more satisfyingly about Tony and Carol on the road to recovering their combined mojos.
When Carol's drink driving charge is made to disappear so she can head up the new cross police force MIT (ReMIT) she quickly gathers a crack team around her and starts them of on a 'training exercise' to find out more about a series of suicides involving women who have publicly disparaged 'men behaving badly'  and subsequently been targeted by social media trolls.  As you'd expect when Tony Hill's brain is involved the links between the deaths  take an unexpected turn and the team find they are searching for a serial killer who, until now has flown beneath the radar.
It feels sooooooo good to have the old Hill/Jordan dynamic back in gear, but I for one am not going to get too comfortable with this as I suspect, in true McDermidesque style, the author with get the sandpaper out and roughen up the edges a bit.  Hill, as ever, is a delight of awkward brilliance, Jordan is brusque, determined and fragile, but for me Splinter the Silence is stolen by DC Stacey Chen (the Tech geek) who not only displays a wealth of tricksy little techie numbers to push the investigation forward she also grows a pair of balls that should have every woman this side of Mars cheering with delight ... and with a totally unexpected but beautifully executed ball breaker at the end, for me, she steals the show.
However, Stacey Chen's twist isn't the only one McDermid leaves us with.  As usual she leaves us with the delight satisfaction of happiness tempered with all the sourness of  a stick of rhubarb and no sugar bag to dip it in!
Available on amazon Kindle £4.99 or HB £12.99
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Splinter-Silence-Tony-Hill-McDermid/dp/140870689X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437741588&sr=8-1&keywords=splinter+the+silence