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The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid
Amazon.com This sadistic, twisted yet intriguingly ingenious thriller garnered Val McDermid Britain's top crime-fiction award, the Gold Dagger, which only proves it's not as genteel a nation as we've been led to believe. The Mermaids Singing follows a killer who thrives on finding ever more inventive ways to seduce and torture sexually confused young men and records their death struggles digitally to market them as interactive home movies. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Reader Reviews 0 of 2 people found the following review helpful: Clumsy plot, near-offensive gay caricatures, March 6, 2003 Reviewer: Miriam Zellnik from Portland, OR USA Setting aside a gaping hole or two in the plot, the scenes of gay nightlife and the way the mystery progresses triggered all my "latent homophobia" radar. I understand McDermid has written excellent books featuring a lesbian detective, but based on this book, I figured her to be an over-simplifying dolt, not quite a "gay basher" but having more of a "Look at these ever so *intersting* people in the zoo!" kind of vibe, which in some ways is worse. I also read "Place of Execution" which i liked much better, but in both cases you wish the author were sitting beside you so you could ask a few basic questions and point out glaring inconsistances or ask about ridiculous assumptions on which the plot rests.
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