Absolution

by Caro Ramsay

Overview

The Crucifixion Killer is stalking Glasgow, leaving victims’ mutilated bodies in a Christ-like pose. Detective Chief Inspector Alan McAlpine is drafted in to lead the hunt, supported by local officers Detective Inspector Anderson and Detective Sergeant Costello.

But the past holds horrific memories for McAlpine. He last worked this beat some twenty years earlier, when he was assigned to guard a woman—faceless after a sadistic acid attack—at a Glasgow hospital. An obsession was born in that hospital room that has never quite left McAlpine and now it seems to be resurfacing. As the chase to halt the gruesome murders intensifies, so Anderson and Costello find chilling cause for concern uncomfortably close to home . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786898739
Publisher:	Black Thorn
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Series:	Anderson and Costello thrillers , #1
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Caro Ramsay is the Glaswegian author of the critically acclaimed DI Anderson and DS Costello series, including Absolution andThe Suffering of Strangers.

@CaroRamsayBooks | caroramsay.com

Editorial Reviews

Absolution is among the year’s best literary thrillers” Washington Post

“Brilliant in twisting the tension tauter with each page” Guardian

From the Publisher

As she tells her story, Ramsay often introduces a character or a conversation whose identity or meaning we simply don't know. She keeps us guessing and explains things in her own sweet time. It works because the story she tells, although leisurely, is highly literate and entirely engrossing…Absolution is among the year's best literary thrillers. It's another reminder of how many of today's most talented young writers, who 20 years ago would have pursued literary fiction, are drawn to crime fiction for both its artistic and commercial possibilities. Among Americans, Dennis Lehane, who advanced from private-eye novels to is a prime example. Based on this first effort, we have reason to expect more good things from Caro Ramsay of Glasgow.
—The Washington Post

Patrick Anderson

Glasgow-born Ramsay's debut novel combines several gruesome killings spanning a 22-year period with the story of a haunting and unresolved love. Alan McAlpine is a young officer just coming to terms with his brother's death and his mother's illness and grief when he's assigned to guard an unidentified woman in white. An acid attack has destroyed the woman's face and left her unable to see or speak. She's given birth to a girl she hasn't been allowed to touch. Knowing instinctively what she wants, McAlpine places the baby where she can feel it. When the woman is identified and connected to a heartbreaking event that touches McAlpine's personal life, he's barred from her room. Twenty two years later, McAlpine is married to Helena, an heiress he met when her mother died in a car accident. An artist of some renown, Helena is tolerant of McAlpine's job, but recoils, like the rest of Glasgow, at a series of murders that McAlpine investigates involving disemboweled victims who have been positioned as though crucified. In order to solve the case, McAlpine, now a senior police official, must return to the station where he began his career more than two decades before and confront the past as well as a serial killer. Ramsay shows some promise, but unlikely coincidences, a forest of characters, meandering dialogue and Scottish-centric colloquialisms hamper the story.

Kirkus Reviews