Cross and Burn by Val Mcdermid

Cross and Burn by Val Mcdermid

"McDermid is at the top of her form in this sizzling story. . . . You will not put this one down until the final sentence."--Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

"Hill and Jordan dominate as brilliantly as ever."--The Times (Saturday Review) (UK)

Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels are thrillers at their best--unbearably suspenseful, psychologically complex, expertly plotted and impossible to predict--and they have riveted millions worldwide. As Cross and Burn opens, Tony and Carol are facing the biggest challenge of their professional lives: how to live without each other. No one has seen Carol in three months, and without her, the police brass no longer want Tony's services. Even more damaging is the fact that they both hold Tony responsible for the bloody havoc their last case wreaked on Carol's life and family, and Carol has sworn she'll never speak to Tony again. But just because Tony and Carol's relationship is finished doesn't mean the killing is. A body has been discovered in an abandoned flat inhabited by squatters. As connections to other missing or dead women emerge, a horrifying pattern becomes clear: someone is killing women, all of whom bear a striking resemblance to Carol Jordan. And when the evidence begins to point in a disturbing and unexpected direction, thinking the unthinkable seems the only possible answer.

"Pure reading joy! Welcome back, queen of crime Val McDermid."--The Florida Times-Union

"Fiendishly clever . . . The ingenious way in which [the villain] tests the mettle of Hill and Jordan is not to be missed by fans of the unusual sleuthing duo."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into forty languages, and have sold over seventeen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011.

In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She writes full time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.