Absolution - Hardcover

Ramsay, Caro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933648414 ISBN 13: 9781933648415

Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2007

Synopsis

It's twenty years since police detective Man McAlpine has set foot in Patrickhill Station - and more than twenty years since he fell forever in love with the mute, faceless woman he called Anna as she lay dying in Glasgow's Western Infirmary. Daily he'd watched over her, and they had begun to communicate with each other, she by moving her wounded fingers. Her fingers could not tell the sad, unseasoned police cadet her name, however, or name for him the father of her newborn baby girl or identity the assailants who had flung the acid in her once incomparably beautiful face. Or tell him how she'd smuggled a cache of uncut diamonds into Scotland.
Now McAlpine is back in Patrickhill, where he's been summoned to head up the investigation of a disturbing murder case. Two women - their arms outstretched, their legs together and feet crossed at the ankle - have already died at the hands of a man the press has tagged the Crucifixion killer. More gruesomely, the third victim is also violently disfigured when her body is discovered up in Whistler's Lane, coincidentally (perhaps) the scene of an equally brutal murder four years earlier.
The face of another woman, though - a strikingly beautiful young woman, blond - has taken hold of Detective McAlpine's consciousness, and soon the consequences of a case cold for two decades are commanding - and dangerously thwarting - the course of his team's current, already desperate investigation.
With crimes in the present continually detouring both McAlpine and the elusive killer he pursues into an unredeemed past, the mystery in this steely piercing psychological thriller is as gripping as its twists are surprising. And absolution proves to be extreme.

About this title

About the Author

Caro Ramsay was born and educated in Glasgow. She has been writing crime stories since she was five years old, developing the talent that led her to write Absolution, her first novel. Ramsay lives in a village on the west coast of Scotland.

Reviews

Scottish author Ramsay's atmospheric and melancholic novel is a solid but unremarkable debut. Deeply flawed Glaswegian police constable Alan McAlpine is obsessed with an unsolved case more than two decades old, involving an acid attack on a young pregnant woman who committed suicide shortly after giving birth. As McAlpine investigates a bizarre series of Crucifixion murders, in which all the victims have been disemboweled and laid out with arms spread and feet crossed at the ankle, he begins to suspect that this killer is somehow tied to the mystery of his blonde angel. The pacing is sluggish, but Ramsay manages to paint a vivid picture of rain-lashed Glasgow. The stark late autumn landscape is a fitting backdrop to the brutal murders as well as McAlpine's dark epiphanies. Ramsay has tremendous potential, but there needs to be more to McAlpine than formulaic angst if he's to succeed as a series protagonist. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1933648414
• ISBN 13: 9781933648415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 401