Val McDermid is an experienced crime novelist who knows the importance of the "body on the first page". Killing the Shadows certainly doesn't want for bodies. Within the first twenty pages we have four murders in three countries! There's a Jack the Ripper style murder in Edinburgh, a brace of murders in Spain and an old murder in London which bears a striking resemblance to a certain real world case from a few years back.

Which if any of these are related, and how? In to the fray comes Professor Fiona Cameron, a psychologist and computer expert who has developed new profiling techniques. Things start to become personal - her partner is himself a thriller writer and hence a potential victim.

The story certainly starts out with a bang. Unfortunately it doesn't have the substance to follow up. The plot trundles along for many, many pages with various thriller writers popping up only to be quickly bumped off. Eventually we reach an exciting ending, though the explanation of why thriller writers are being targeted is at best contrived.

Which brings me to my big problem with this novel. Fiction is all about suspension of disbelief. Puncture that and the reader fails to be caught up in the story, becoming instead a disassociated observer. One thing that always destroys my personal suspension of disbelief is a story about a writer. Having a main character who is an author and/or a plot built around writing constantly reminds me that I'm reading a work of fiction. The spell is broken.

Killing the Shadows suffers badly from this. As I've already said, the main character's partner not only happens to be a novelist but also happens to be a thriller writer who just happens to write about serial killers. The cover blurb describes the book as "multi-layered" and it's true that there are different levels to the story. Even the title has (as usual with McDermid) multiple interpretations. For me it was all irritatingly self-referential, so much so that it imploded and I couldn't get absorbed in the story.

One suspects McDermid is indulging in a few in-jokes at her colleagues' expense. The roman a clef elements probably have those in the know chuckling away; they left me cold.

Perhaps everything would have been OK if McDermid had hurried us through the story quickly enough that we didn't have time to stop and think. Unfortunately, after the first part the book drags badly until the climax.

As one would expect from McDermid, the novel is competently written and well plotted. Unfortunately the story just isn't strong enough to justify the length and the basic concept is a mistake. If Killing the Shadows had been written by an author less established than McDermid I doubt it would have been published without a lot of editing.