MERCY - Book review - ADULT CONTENT

David Lindsey’s ‘sexually charged thriller’ Mercy was published in 1990 and runs to 673 pages and covers a harrowing series of murders in seven days.

Houston, Texas. Homicide detective Carmen Palma is dedicated and tenacious. She needs to be in a homicide department packed with men. Her older and vastly experienced fellow detective partner Birley is coming to the end of his career; he’s supportive and trustworthy. They’re both called out for the murder of Dorothy Ann Samerov – a grisly corpse with sexual overtones. It’s highly likely that this could be the second murder committed by a serial killer: the first was only a week ago: Sandra Moser.

Both deaths involved sadomasochism. The book title is the safe word used by a participant – called out to stop the pain when it gets too much. Each subject might have a different agreed safe word. Though in the case of Sandra, the safe word was ignored, and she became the first victim...

It soon becomes obvious that there’s an underground network of wealthy Houston women living secret double lives. Some of them are connected to the psychotherapist Broussard, yet he has a solid alibi...

FBI Profiler Sander Grant is called in to assist Palma, and he proves to be a fascinating character, almost as strong as Palma herself.

This is a police procedural that leaves little to the imagination in either gore or sex.

The high page-count can be partly attributed to the detail Lindsey provides in the description of every item of clothing, every tree, and the car routes taken by Palma in her investigations. It’s immersive narrative, often employed in non-fiction work such as David Simon’s ground-breaking Homicide.

Apart from the in-depth treatment of psychology of serial killers, psychosexual villains and psychiatry in general, Lindsey has a gripping often humane style, as these two examples might indicate:

‘Life was gradually taken away what it had gradually given. It was the nature of things, but few people understood their tentative ownership of their gifts until they saw them being taken away from someone they loved. If you were lucky life allowed you that, a preview of the way it was going to be’ (p219).

‘We only know people to the extent they want us to know them’ (p252).

And despite the graphic murder and sex scenes, his other visuals are also effective too:

‘rain glittering through the beans of her headlights like shattered glass falling out of the black sky’ (p331).

 However, if you think you’ll be offended by the subject matter, then avoid. 

The book was adapted into a movie with the same title in 2000.