Death Delights by Gabrielle Lord

Publisher's Synopsis

Forensic scientist Jack McCann, an ex-crime scene detective, is separated from his difficult wife and living with his 17-year-old son, Greg. He is also trying to track down his teenage daughter, Jacinta, who ran away two years ago - an event that stirred memories of an earlier tragedy, the abduction of his little sister Rosie from outside the family home in 1975.

Reluctantly, Jack agrees to help a detective friend investigate a series of grisly pedophile murders. Then an anonymous telephone tip-off about Jacinta's whereabouts leads Jack into an intimate relationship with an enigmatic woman, a relationship that threatens not only to compromise the entire investigation, but also to bring him appallingly close to the mutilator murderer.

As Jack uncovers the extraordinary link between the old and new crimes, he is forced to confront the destructive patterns within his own family. But before he can fully unravel the mystery, he unwittingly exposes both himself and his son to deadly danger.

My Review 

Right from the outset we are confronted with a grim scene as Jack McCain pokes through the dingy apartment of a murder victim. While doing so he is also going through the details of the murder and the victim in his mind, a graphic and sordid account that immediately gets the skin crawling.

The victim is a man who has recently been released from prison where he was serving time for sex crimes against minors. He died as a result of massive blood loss after having his penis and testicles cut off and is the second such case in a relatively short amount of time. It looks as though there might by a killer out there targeting paedophiles and exacting his own brand of rough justice.

A disturbing case, to be sure, but McCain is also trying to deal with his own personal problems. He has separated from his wife recently and the split has been anything but amicable. His son has just decided that he wants to live with his father, which is fine with Jack, but makes his wife even more resentful of him. And finally, and most distressingly, he has a teenage daughter who disappeared onto the streets 2 years ago and although he believes she is alive out there somewhere, he has never stopped searching for her. Now that he has moved back to Sydney full time he can devote some more meaningful energy in hunting for her around the dingy alleys of Kings Cross.

When an anonymous call regarding his daughter is received by the police, it is immediately forwarded on. It appears that his daughter had been spotted working in one of the city's many brothels strengthens his resolve and his hopes that he can save her from a nightmare life of prostitution and drugs.

To top off the complicated world of Jack McCain, we find that he is also haunted by the disappearance of his sister many years ago, a disappearance that he has never really gotten over and has been recreated by the loss of his daughter. Incredibly, all of these problems are going to play an integral part in the case on which he has been called in to assist.

In a story full of complexities and coincidences, McCain's personal and professional lives are eerily intertwined, driving him on with an almost manic determination. Somehow cases involving a murderer of paedophiles and a girl who has been missing for over 20 years are going to be brought together by the brother of the missing girl.

With numerous sub-plots running through the book dealing with so many emotionally sensitive issues, it's just not possible to grow bored with this story. There's rarely a moment of downtime with Jack McCain showing all the signs of a workaholic. Frantic is the best word that sums up Death Delights because McCain does everything at one pace - flat out. This is great for solving crimes but, as we are to find out, it can cause havoc with the family life.

There is another important aspect of Death Delights that is handled particularly well by Gabrielle Lord and that is in the field of forensic research. There are many procedures and tests carried out during the book and they could have potentially been very boring or difficult to understand, but Lord describes them in such a way that they are extremely fascinating and I felt this contributed greatly to the appeal of the story.

It's no wonder Gabrielle Lord is regarded as one of the leading crime authors in Australia with books as well constructed and consistently compelling as this one. Deservedly, Death Delights won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Australian Crime Fiction novel in 2002 and has so far been followed by two more superb forensic thrillers featuring Jack McCain.