Could it be that when Hamlet thought there was something fishy in the state of Denmark, he was suffering from the same rare neurological condition that Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie has in Nigel McCrery’s mystery/thriller, Tooth and Claw, namely synaesthesia? That’s when, through some misfiring of neurons or messed up wiring in the brain, a person gets his/her sensory experiences switched, one for the other. For instance, in Lapslie’s case, generally this involves his hearing something or someone, which is then translated as some normal (relatively speaking) – to bizarre – taste or combination of tastes.
Because of his synaesthia, Lapslie has had to work from his home using his computer. He can’t stand to be around noises of any kind, which is, to put it mildly, a detriment in his line of work. His disorder has led also to his wife leaving him and taking their kids with her. Even living in a fairly secluded area as he does, some noises and voices create such disgusting and intense tastes for him that he gets physically ill and has to throw up.
As in the first book in this series, Still Waters, a serial killer is on the loose. Despite Lapslie’s neurological condition, Chief Superintendent Rouse, who seems to hold a grudge against Lapslie, assigns him to the case of a newscaster, Catherine Charnaud, who has been brutally murdered by the killer. She’d been tortured to death, the flesh and muscles of her forearm stripped off of the bone, and she likely died of blood loss, shock, and heart failure due to the torture.
Later in the novel, a railway station commuter gets blown up by a bomb that the police at first suspect was the work of terrorists, but Lapslie eventually discovers was committed by the same person who murdered the glamorous TV newscaster. He makes this discovery because his synaesthia is working in reverse – he can somehow detect an odor that the killer is giving off in his sweat and urine, caused by the porphyia he suffers from. When he detects the odor, Lapslie hears the sound of drums pounding out a rythm, a sound which, of course, no one else can hear. He at first questions himself and doubts the possiblity that he could be able to act as a sort of human bloodhound, but comes to realize that, at least in this one instance, his disorder has a potential benefit to his being able to track down the killer.
The novel alternates its POV between that of DCI Mark Lapslie and Carl Whittley, the murderer. I’m not giving anything away by saying this, because we are told almost from the start of the book this information. It’s a psychological look into the windows of a twisted killer’s soul, and though his motive is not a rational one, he has his reasons for continuing to commit murders. I usually like to read mystery novels in which the reader doesn’t know early on who is the murderer, because I like to try to match wits with the detective and solve the crime(s) before he/she does; but, I found myself liking this novel because of the fascinating psychological profile the author develops of Carl Whittley.
Carl thinks he will be able to get away with his murders indefinitely. That’s because he knows that serial killers usually only get caught after detectives figure out key elements to their murders that form a pattern. Carl tries to not have any sort of discernible pattern to his murders, picking his victims at random and killing each in a different way, so that no pattern would be detectable. For his next victim, he thinks it might be interesting to choose a cop, one directly involved in the case. His plotting and scheming to carry out this plan is one of the most suspenseful parts of the novel, as he attempts to hunt down the people who are trying to hunt him.
Carl has a Norman Bates-like quality about him, a love/hate relationship with his mother that made me think of Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. This, to me, made the book that much more intriguing, and made me want to keep reading, to see to what lengths this warped individual would go to to carry out his plans.
I also like how realistically the conditions that both Laspslie and Carl Whittley suffer from are handled by the author. McCrery has obviously done a lot of research on both synaesthia and porphyia. There are some aspects of what happens that stretched my abilty to accept Lapslie’s hidden ability, like when he detects the killer’s odor on a corpse that’s been dead over a year and has been kept in cold storage – but, altogether, the author did a great job with creating two very believable characters who are alike in that both are physically and psychologically damaged.
This is the sort of book in which the reader knows who the murderer is by chapter two. There are no surprises as to who the murderer is, so the suspense in Tooth and Claw comes from the author’s spot-on depiction of a serial killer’s psychology and DCI Mark Lapslie’s attempts to solve the two apparently unrelated cases and to use his disorder in his favor. I’d highly recommend Tooth and Claw to anyone who likes the mystery genre and who also enjoys reading intense psychological portrayals of serial killers.
