What Is The Twist In 'A Place Of Execution'?

One of the things I loved about A Place of Execution was the twist, and how it re-contextualized everything you thought you had read. For most of the book, A Place of Execution is a true-crime investigation. A twenty year old shepherd’s daughter goes missing in 1963. The police investigation uncovers a murderer who confesses to the crime, and he is brought to trial and sentenced.

Then the modern-day epilogue reveals the truth: the girl who went missing was invented by the villagers as part of a theatrical production designed to conceal a dark secret: child abuse within the tight-knit community of a small valley had been going on for generations. The person who confessed to the murder of the girl in 1963 had taken the blame for others to keep his secret hidden.

It’s so well done because the author has implanted loads of clues in the rest of the book, such as the girl not being in school, villagers acting strangely collectively, and everyone outside the valley having not remembered her. It’s really great. It makes the book so much better to re-read, showing how a community can make up a load of nonsense to protect their own and how we accept official stories without really questioning them.

And then there’s the end of Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution. The revelation hits like a freight train. What had started out as a missing-persons inquiry in a 1960s English village for a journalist investigating the disappearance of a young girl turns out to have been all a elaborate construct – and the girl had never existed. She was a fantasy created by an older crime to be covered up by the inhabitants of the village over decades, and their seeming cooperation with the investigation into her disappearance was all part of the deceit. McDermid is a master at making the reader question everything they have read previously.

I think I can confidently say that “A Place of Execution” by Val McDermid has one of the best plotted twists in modern literature. The story is told through a journalist investigating the disappearance of a teenager from a remote village in the 1960s. The reader follows the journalist and the police as they investigate a potential murder through the police procedural and the journalist’s interviews with people involved.

The author then pulls the carpet from under the reader in the modern-day framing story. The researcher into true crime discovers the reason the journalist created the lie was that a real crime had been committed by the whole village and he created a diversion to cover up their crimes. It is one of the best plot twists of modern literature and re-reads the whole book in a different light. Suddenly innocent conversations become coded confessions and witness testimonies become rehearsed performances.

The structure of the novel reveals how this twist could have been conceived. The construction of the original investigation is laid out before the reader in the form of historical documents and taped interviews, creating belief in the events as they unfold until the ultimate revelation. The novel becomes metafiction as the book itself becomes part of the deception in which the reader is left wondering what is true and what has been fabricated by the characters in the novel.