Tony Hill and Carol Jordan

About the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series

Val McDermid's best-known series pairs Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist and profiler with a troubled personal history and an unnerving gift for thinking like the killers he hunts, with Carol Jordan, a police officer whose career and personal life become entangled with his across two decades of investigations. The opening book, The Mermaids Singing (1995), won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger and set the template for the psychological-thriller-plus-procedural hybrid McDermid became known for: visceral, carefully researched violence, an unusual willingness to sit inside a killer's point of view, and a slow-burning will-they-won't-they tension between its two leads that the series never rushes to resolve.

Across eleven novels, Tony and Carol's relationship survives suspensions, near-misses, institutional politics, and periods working entirely apart, while the cases escalate from serial murder investigations into wider questions about policing, profiling, and the psychology of violence. The series was adapted for British television as Wire in the Blood (2002-2008), which took its name from the second novel and significantly increased the books' international profile; note that the TV series and the second novel share a title but the books are more commonly referred to collectively by the characters' names.