I believe Val McDermid is a woman. I haven't read any of her books, but when I looked for info on them a while ago after watching the TV series I remember reading somewhere that the phrase "wire in the blood" comes from a T.S. Eliot poem. I don't know the context, though. Personally, the phrase makes me think of buzzing, restless energy. Or maybe the unnatural hidden in the natural.

Val indeed is a woman, I've now learnt. I hit her website, and the question's asked there by fans too, but no conclusive answer is given, and none at all by authority.

from zap2it

In "Wire" (which takes its name from a line in a T.S. Eliot poem), Green plays Dr. Tony Hill, a university lecturer and clinical psychologist specializing in serial killers.

From T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets,

Burnt Norton (the first quartet)
II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

excerpt from TS Eliot accurate online texts

Another one of her books is called The Mermaids Singing which is from The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock , another poem by T S Eliot

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

There is also McDermid's The Last Temptation which comes from TS Eliot's The Murder In The Cathedral

The last temptation is the greatest treason;
To do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Fuck, Eliot's good. Leaving aside the meaning, he's just the best poet of the 20th century in terms of sensous sound.

Can we not leave aside the meaning? Because I still don't get it. I think I basically get the other two poems, though.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I've always found these lines almost unbearably sad.

I once tried to force my friend to dress up for halloween by rolling up his pant legs and shoving a can of peaches in his hand and instructing him to say "Do I dare? Do I dare?" It was his own frinkin' party and he was the only one not dressed up.

I once tried to force my friend to dress up for halloween by rolling up his pant legs and shoving a can of peaches in his hand and instructing him to say "Do I dare? Do I dare?"

BWAH! I love it.

My mother used to have a cartoon from the New Yorker on her door. It was a pair of mermaids sitting on a rock by the shore, looking at a lump of a man who was walking on the beach. Caption: "I'm not singing to THAT guy."

I think I liked T. S. Eliot a lot better when I didn't know he was a weirdo in real life.

BWAH! I love it.

I thought it was pretty inspired, but he was a big party pooper.