Cutting edge ... British crime novelist Val McDermid. Cutting edge ... British crime novelist Val McDermid. Photo: Ulf Andersen

CROSS AND BURN
By Val McDermid. Little, Brown. 438pp. A$29.99

LOVE STORY, WITH MURDERS
By Harry Bingham. Orion. 441pp.A $29.99.

 We've been through the mill with psychologist Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan. So much so that I suspected we might have seen the last of them following the dire conclusion to Retribution, the previous book in this series. At that point what looked like the promise of a happy ending exploded into tragedy and estrangement. Evidently, Val McDermid hasn't finished worrying with the pair just yet.
<i>Cross and Burn</i> by Val McDermid.And what a mismatched couple they are: he is impotent, she has an alcohol problem. Furthermore, despite the fact they ''love'' each other, neither appears capable of intimacy. Consummation, of course, would be a disaster for a series that depends as much on the emotional peaks and troughs of its central characters as it does on the crimes they confront.
Cross and Burn by Val McDermid.

Relationships, and there are lots of them, drive Cross and Burn. As always there is that of Tony and Carol; he is living on a houseboat and she is renovating a barn having left the police force in the aftermath of the bloodbath that was Retribution. They are not speaking.
Acting as impromptu go-between is Carol's former offsider, DS Paula McIntyre. Paula is also coping with a missing friend whose 14-year-old son she and her partner, Elinor, ''adopt'' when it becomes apparent that his mum is never coming home. There are some nice observations about the hazards of living with an adolescent boy whose capacity to take up space is out of all proportion to their physical size. Been there.
And then there's the killer, the deranged soul in search of the perfect wife and determined to beat every unfortunate woman he abducts into perfection: women who happen to look like Carol Jordan. When Tony becomes a suspect in these murders, and his only convincing alibi is that he was home alone watching ''Scandinavian noir'' on TV, the plot takes a more elaborate twist.