KAREN PIRIE RETURNS. A MASTERFUL THRILLER BY THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER VAL MCDERMID

Book blurb

Edinburgh, haunted by the ghosts of its many writers, is also the cold case beat of DCI Karen Pirie. So she shouldn’t be surprised when an author’s manuscript appears to be a blueprint for an actual crime.

Karen can’t ignore the plot’s chilling similarities to the unsolved case of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there’s a problem: the author died before he finished it.

As Karen digs deeper, she uncovers a spiralling game of betrayal and revenge, where lies are indistinguishable from the truth and with more than one unexpected twist . . .

My thoughts

DCI Karen Pirie returns residing in Hamish’s flat in a bubble with DS Daisy Mortimer. DC Jason Murray is in a bubble with Eilidh, his fiancé. We are in a COVID lockdown and the HCU (Historic Cases Unit) team are using zoom for work, discussing what needs to be done. It’s all pretty mundane until Jason gets a phone call from an old contact, Meera Reddy, in the National Library. The Library had taken possession of a deceased author’s papers prior to lockdown and since then the contact has been worrying over something she had read. A manuscript ostensibly the beginning of a new book by Jake Stein, the deceased author, she felt might be of interest to the HCU. The manuscript seemed, to her, to link to an actual abduction/missing person case from twelve months ago. At last proper work, a real case to consider and investigate! Although Pirie’s boss isn’t sure she is given a tentative go ahead. The case, of course, has to be investigated within the COVID restrictions.

I saw a social media post of an article by Val McDermid, also referred to in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, in which she explains that she chose to begin her new series set in and called 1979 because she felt that, at the time of writing, she couldn’t write about the then current situation of COVID as it felt too close and I, as many of you will, can understand that.

With Past Lying she has now set a book firmly in the time of COVID and specifically the long lockdown that we came through. McDermid deals very well with it demonstrating how it impacts on the characters and the work of the Police. Amidst all this she goes on to bring us an intriguing and dark cold case story.

The book is fascinating not only for the time it is set in but also as a method of investigating with the unique restrictions of that time. The characters are wonderfully written and the storyline is both an intriguing mystery and a dark story with a nice twist to it. There are other elements of the book which add interest and depth to the storyline. Like Karen taking chances to help her friend Miran who has a difficult situation and wants Karen’s help. Also, with regard to the characters leaving some personal issues to resolve alongside a very sad loss for one of the team.

This is another terrific addition to the wonderful DCI Karen Pirie series and I would recommend it to all who enjoy crime fiction especially McDermid fans. I look forward to reading the next one.

Book: Purchased

Information

Published: Sphere; 1st edition (1 Feb. 2024) | 464 pages | ISBN-10 978-1408729090 | ISBN-13 ‏ :978-1408729090

Buy: Bookshop.org (affiliate link) | AmazonSmileUK | Your local bookshop | Your local library

Author

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

Biography

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Books

Order of books in series

Allie Burns Series | Karen Pirie Series | Tony Hill/Carol Jordan Series

Kate Brannigan Series | Lindsay Gordon Series

Stand-alone Titles

Stand-alone Titles

Karen Pirie series

All Books by Val McDermid