Beneath the Bleeding

By: Val McDermid

Narrated by: Gerard Doyle

Winner of the Gold Dagger Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Val McDermid pens mysteries heralded on both sides of the Atlantic. In Beneath the Bleeding, Dr. Tony Hill must make sense of the perplexing death of a soccer star—but the footballer’s demise is only a prelude to greater violence.

©2009 Val McDermid (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

“McDermid is as smooth a practitioner of crime fiction as anyone out there.” ( New York Times Book Review)

Great listen for fans of the Series.

Any additional comments?

I'm a fan of the TV series and found the audio books to be even better in that they were allowed to go into more detail. The characters were many faceted and not always predictable. Beneath the Bleeding in particular struck a chord with me and I listened to it several times.

So Good!

This is one one Val McDermid’s most intriguing Tony Hill/Carol Jordan mysteries. Gerard Doyle does a good job. The story is so interesting it almost doesn’t matter that he’s not the most talented narrators.

one storyline was enough

The character development is nice, but with 2 big storylines....too many characters. The narrator was good, but did not vary vlmuch between characters. Was that Carol or Paula? Unless the author notes it, you may miss it.

I like the series, this one not my favorite

I enjoy this author and this series, but the story was not one of the best. The narration was a bit lifeless and extremely muffled and hard to hear. I think the quality of the recording was low.

The series has had better.

I think this was a lesser entry in the Carol & Tony saga, but the reader certainly didn't help. Midway through, I began to wonder if these books were just better when read instead of heard, but I don't think it was entirely that. The story itself was a bit clunky, and I realized there was more tell than show than I remembered from previous volumes. The dialogue was lacking and the mysteries felt half-hearted. It's as if the story part of the book got lost in its own politics. There were also a number of threads and asides that never went anywhere, which was distracting. Overall, I'd say this was a middling effort for this author, but I'm hoping for a return to form with the next book. It wasn't horrible. I just expected better.

Now, as for the reader - I have to say that my enjoyment of the book was very much so impacted by the reader. His pacing was odd. It felt like, at times, he just rushed from paragraph to paragraph with no break, which made the material seem disjointed. He also had that odd cadence where his inflection peaked in the middle of the sentence, making each one sound as if it was climbing a hill. He'd start in a normal tone, jump up a little higher (in the way one does when the sentence becomes a question by inflection only), then wind back down to normal. Something about the way he read some of the characters, Carol in particular, made them come off as quite whiny. At the same time, he was also very flat. I'll give him this - he did a pretty decent job with some of the accents.

In sum, there are better books in this series. If you've never read any of them, certainly do not start with this one.