Five Ways to Kill a Man

Scraps of a psychotic killer’s pre-homicide musings alternate with jerkily amalgamated passages unveiling police angst, both public and private, in Gray’s pedestrian seventh procedural featuring Glasgow police detective William Lorimer (after Glasgow Kiss). As the killer progresses through the senseless murder of one helpless old lady after another, Lorimer investigates the suspicious death by arson of financier Sir Ian Jackson, and classily fends off vamping advances by resentful Det. Insp. Rhoda Martin, who’s after his job, while his wife, Maggie, struggles with her mum’s stroke-related problems, which illuminate British socialized medicine. Gray tries too hard to flesh out her slim plot with one conventional device after another, and though she labors mightily to mask it in a crescendo of gory malice and some ham-fisted attempts at twisted psychological motivation, she telegraphs the killer’s identity too soon, and pounds it home through the observations of Lorimer’s profiler colleague, Dr. Solly Brightman. (Dec.)