Still Life: The heart-pounding number one bestseller from the Queen of Crime

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Her writing is intricate and funny, with a knack for describing food (pretty much every scene is centered around some form of eating - and I'm not complaining). This investigation takes place in the last weeks of February 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic kicks off, and ends on the eve of lockdown. McDermid has stated that Jacko Vance, a TV celebrity with a secret lust for torture, murder and under-age girls, who was featured in the Wire in the Blood and two later books, is based on her direct personal experience of interviewing Jimmy Savile. The dead man was the prime suspect in an old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace. This book is a treat for me because it was partly written here in Dunedin while Val was here in 2019.

When she discovers a lead about the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable, Allie is determined to give a voice to those who have been silenced. One case is the murder of a woman whose skeleton was found in Perth, on the property of a road accident victim named Susan Leitch. She hails from the Kirkcaldy town of Fife in Scotland and completed her college studies from the St.By then, we were certainly talking and thinking about it, but still oblivious to the impact it would come to have on us all - and I am (was, sniff) a travel doctor so of course it was all we could think about. The police work is necessarily plodding as Karen and her team must dig for information and sush out clues to take the cases forward but I enjoyed the pace at which everything is revealed. I love the crime procedure and each piece of the puzzle getting thrown in to create the bigger picture. Many, many years ago, when I was still a teenager, I read a book by Val McDermid and decided that I absolutely must read another.

Of course, Chandler was never much good at plotting, and one usually forgives him because there is so much else that is good. The Hill/Jordan series has been adapted for television under the name Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green. Karen has only one minor skirmish with her boss ("the dog biscuit") and both the cold cases she's been assigned move forward smoothly.I think it's been a long time since I read a book so solidly set in the realities of conducting an investigation in Europe in the era of the European Union. This installment also introduces some new characters, including Daisy, a young sergeant who has a lot of promise and meshes well with Karen. High ranking police officials want to know if there is any connection to the suicide and possible governmental embarrassment.

Val McDermid is the award-winning, international bestselling author of more than thirty novels and has been hailed as Britain’s Queen of Crime.

This doubtless is why some good crime novelists today, Andrew Taylor for example, have turned away from the contemporary scene. I can only hope there is more DCI Pirie to come, as this was surely one of the best police procedurals I have read in a long while.