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A Place of Execution

Author: Val Mcdermid
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

56 reviews
Sales Rank: 20375

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7

ISBN: 0002326760
EAN: 9780002326766
ASIN: 0002326760

Publication Date: June 7, 1999
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BCA Edition 1999 - very slightly different picture - dustjacket is worn with a few tears, some stuck with sellotape, and creases and knocks to edges, but book itself in very good condition

Also Available In:

•	Paperback - A Place of Execution

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
Val McDermid is known for the violence, and tension, of her writing. Both The Mermaids Singing, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of 1995, and The Wire in the Blood (1997) are monuments to the human capacity for torture (and the psychological profiling supposed to counter it). No less thrilling, A Place of Execution is, however, a different kind of book. On one level, it is about the disappearance of a schoolgirl, Alison Carter, in December 1963: a girl from a tiny Derbyshire village whose disappearance turns into a personal quest for the detective heading the investigation, George Bennett. Resisting comparisons with events in Manchester (what are now known as the "Moors Murders"), Bennett is confronted with the strange and isolated community of Scardale: a community reputed to be a "a law unto itself", it may well harbour the kind of secret which allows murder to reverberate across the generations. Building slowly, suspensefully, McDermid takes her readers through Bennett's investigation and the trial which follows, projecting back to the beginning of the 1960s a very contemporary anxiety about the "desecration of childhood". It's an intelligent and compelling move, one that sustains the book's shift to the present and Bennett's return to the case decades later when he tells his story to the journalist, Catherine Heathcote. Heathcote is a woman who wants to know; complex, thoughtful, skillfully plotted, A Place of Execution suggests how unsettling that knowledge can be. --Vicky Lebeau

Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

A Place of Execution August 11, 2008
Sorry to say, but this book failed to grab me. Deadly dull it dragged on to the end with a promise of a final twist which, I found more insulting than surprising. I think the book would have worked better at half the length. To the author's credit she does an excellent job of creating a time and place in the past but the momentum of the story is too slow.

4 out of 5 stars

don't give up! July 20, 2008
Having read several Tony Hill books and really enjoyed them, I found the first two thirds of this book slow going and a bit of a struggle to be honest. Then from the trial onwards it really picked up and the last section, bringing the action into the present, is truly excellent with a twist I did not see coming. I am so pleased I did not give up on this book and carried on when I was thinking of dumping it.I have not given 5 stars because of the slow start but I thoroughly recommend this book.

4 out of 5 stars

A Cracking Read March 7, 2008
I bought this book six years ago and never got arround to reading it. I was bored the other day so I thought I'd give it a go. Once I started reading I honestly could not put this book down. This is the first Val McDermid book I have read.

The book starts off as a typical "who dunnit" murder mystery resulting in a surprising twist at the end that is totally unpredictable.

5 out of 5 stars

Riveting, absorbing, entertaining and satisfying May 2, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

Val McDermid has written some outstanding novels (The Torment of Others, Wire in the Blood and Mermaids Singing spring to mind) but somehow, somehow this one probably tops the lot. It is utterly immaculate in its (forgive the pun) execution, in its pace and structure, in its characterisation and in its capacity to surprise and even deceive the reader. I need not go over the summary of the story here as so many others have already done that, but can I just repeat the words of the Daily Telegraph’s Gerald Kaufman, who stated that “It may be that McDermid will write better novels than this in the future, but I do not see how.” I concur with that view absolutely.

For those of you who remember seeing Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ the first time, you will probably recall wanting to see the film all over again immediately, realising at the end that most of what had gone before was not as you had assumed. So it follows that in A Place of Execution, despite admirably detailed accounts of the investigations into the case of a missing teenage girl back in 1963, which in effect come to a seemingly satisfying conclusion three-quarters of the way through the book, the final quarter which unravels itself 35 years later in 1998 manages to completely dismantle our earlier belief that justice had been done and made me want to read the 1960s part of this book again to see if I could have guessed what was coming. Of course, I already knew that there was going to be a twist to this tale and I took much pleasure in taking guesses as to what it would be; a miscarriage of justice was the most obvious, but that cannot be said to be true because for all human reasons other than legal, justice was clearly served even if there were some unexpectedly high prices to be paid, it later emerged, on the part of more than one victim.

This is storytelling at its best. The characters are so real that I feel that I want to contact them and talk about their experiences. I led myself to understand that A Place of Execution is based on a true story, in which case it only serves to underline that truth is invariably stranger and more convincing than fiction. There are some stories that just cannot be made up, and I reckon that this is one of them. Knowing the story was based on real-life events had left this novel on my library shelves at home for more than a year – what a mistake that was, and I discovered this within a handful of pages. It has few flaws, it has been written by a masterful and confident writer at the top of her game and I recommend it without reservation.

If you haven’t read it yet, then do not hesitate : order your copy today. And while you’re at it, buy at least a half-dozen more Val McDermid novels, because in the world of suspense, mystery and crime writing she really has very few peers.

5 out of 5 stars

Truly Excellent, You MUST read! September 10, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

I bought this book as something to read when I was on holiday. It was the first time I had ever heard of Val MacDermid, and it won't be the last book of hers that I will read. I found it to be captivating and one of those books that you could'nt put down.
The plot was facinating and the characters were described in so much detail. It one of those few books that I could read over and Over again.
You will not regret buying this book.