The Yeare's Midnight: A Psychological Thriller - Hardcover

O'Connor, Ed

3.42

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780786710287: The Yeare's Midnight: A Psychological Thriller

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786710284 ISBN 13: 9780786710287

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2002

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An international sports star is found murdered—her face mutilated in a bizarre, ritualistic manner. What is the significance of the poetic text the killer has left at the crime scene? Why did he surgically remove the victim’s left eye? And can a Cambridge lecturer help the police reconstruct the killer’s fantasy in time to save her own life? As Inspector John Underwood and his team work frantically to piece together the last hours of Olympic athlete Lucy Harrington, events take an unexpected turn. Harrington’s murderer contacts English literature lecturer Heather Stussmann and invites her to explain his actions to the police. But another murder will take place before Stussmann finds the key to understanding the killer’s terrifying motive, which lies buried in the works of a poet who has been dead for nearly four hundred years. In The Yeare’s Midnight, author Ed O’Connor has created a villain with an intellect as cunning as it is monstrous. Donne’s cerebral poems, such as “The Feaver” and “The First Anniversary,” are ingeniously transmogrified into a thriller that melds metaphysics and mortality.

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About the Author:

Ed O'Connor is 30 years old and this is his first novel. After university he worked in London and New York as a merchant banker but left the city to concentrate on writing. Ed lives in Hertfordshire and is currently working on his second book.

From Publishers Weekly:

First-time novelist O'Connor scores points for his inventive premise which marries the poetry of John Donne with cold-blooded serial murders even if other elements of his psychological thriller are not quite as fresh. Populated with some stock characters the glum, disillusioned detective; the brilliant but deranged killer; the beautiful lady professor (with thick hair and a firm handshake) recruited to help the police O'Connor's story traces a frenzied police investigation launched after gold medal-winning swimmer Lucy Harrington is found murdered in her home near the small English town of New Bolden. Harrington's left eye has been removed, and a snippet of a poem by Donne left scrawled on her bathroom wall in blood. Brooding Det. Insp. John Underwood and his team enlist the aid of Cambridge guest lecturer Dr. Heather Stussman, a poetry expert who's already been contacted by the Donne-obsessed killer, Crowan Frayne. The investigation isn't helped by the embittered Underwood going to pieces over wife Julia's infidelity and estrangement. Unfortunately, O'Connor shows us nothing of Underwood's earlier, presumably happier life with Julia; all we get to see is his slide into despair, vindictiveness and madness. The resulting portrait, though viscerally potent, feels unbalanced. O'Connor writes with stylish, clipped prose and an assured pace, and his dialogue can be pithy (when Stussman asks a condescending senior professor his opinion of her controversial new book, he tells her, "I thought your na‹vet‚ was endearing"). Still, the novel is hurt by its abrupt, muddled ending and strangely literal-minded take on Donne's oeuvre.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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