Out of Bounds

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This is the fourth in the series and never once did I feel like I was missing something. She is such a powerful author that I immediately felt included. It can definitely be a stand alone read. The only thing that bothered me is that I can't tell you why I don't read more McDermid. She's a great author with intricate plots set in Scotland. What could be better than that and what is wrong with me for not reading more? What superlatives are there left to describe the phenomenon that is the multi award-winning McDermid? . . . Told with McDermid’s legendary verve and eye for detail, it grabs the reader by the throat and never lets go.”— Daily Mail (UK) Scottish crime writer Val McDermid’s 30th novel, is a suspenseful thriller called Out of Bounds, with Little, Brown – AVAILABLE NOW! A teenage joyrider crashes the stolen car and ends up in a coma. A routine DNA test connects it to an unsolved murder investigation 22 years ago. Will solving the cold case bring all the answers or will this twisty read have DCI Karen Price drawn into another case.

This had it all - great characters - sympathetic, realistically flawed - I adore the relationship between Karen and her loyal offsider Jason, as well as cameos from some of her other protagonists like River. I lived in Edinburgh for ten years so loved the nostalgia trip of being able to picture all the streets, buildings and monuments. There’s a subplot about Syrian refugees that beautifully showcases Karen’s humanity and resolute practicality, and plenty of interesting scientific/forensic details. Here the whodunnit is less important than that “how will she catch them” and no less satisfying. McDermid is an experienced and confident enough writer to not feel the need to link all the cases together by infuriating coincidence, and neither do we have to endure the perpetrator’s POV. There’s no gratuitous violence but this is certainly no cosy mystery. An easy five stars from me. Karen Pirie is a Detective Inspector working in Edinburgh. She hails from Fife, still referred the Kingdom of Fife, which lies across the Firth of Forth from the capital city. Her bumbling assistant is the only other person in the Historic Cases Unit, in other words, the cold case division. In this novel, Karen is called in when the DNA of a teenage joyrider is a familial match to the DNA found in the rape and murder 20 years earlier of a young woman in Glasgow. Karen also gets involved in the case of a death that is initially judged a suicide. This is the case which seems out of bounds for the historic case unit. But Karen is like a dog with a bone and she won't let go of this one, much to the fury of her supervisor who constantly threatens to suspend her or worse. Karen doesn't stop with these two cases. She also encounters a group of Syrian refugees, and befriends them, while seeking to find a way to help. McDermid concocts complex plots with plenty of twists and red herrings. At times the tension is palpable and there are genuine surprises . . . McDermid is a dab hand at creating enough plausibility to make her contributions to the genre intensely readable”― Glasgow Herald When I spotted this,the latest offering from Val McDermid,an author that I greatly admire,I cast all other books aside and headed to the till,hugging this as if it were a treasured possession!!! This was a fantastic story,one that I was completely bewitched by. The writing was so endearingly crafted that,by story's end,I felt that I knew and would recognise Karen and Jason if I met them on the street!McDermid excels in putting the reader at the center of the action . . . A tightly paced mystery . . . My bones tell me we haven’t seen the last of Inspector Pirie – or at least I hope not.

The first chapter of this book features a group of teens who’ve been out drinking, stealing a car, and joyriding themselves to a fatal accident. A fatal car crash leads to information about a cold murder case in the fourth DCI Karen Pirie mystery. Jason Murray – “The Mint” — awwww….I don’t have a maternal bone in my body, but this guy…I just wanted to mother him. He is the other half of the HCU ( a two person Unit) and is so trust-worthy it could end up being his down-fall. Karen works around his flaws, protects him while trying to teach him but I suspect there is only so far she will go…she may just need to shove him out of the nest and hope he learns to fly, not fall! I'm getting addicted to Karen Pirie, a focused, deep thinking detective who refuses to be bullied or indeed intimidated by senior (male) officers; who fosters and grows a network of women friends in labs, courts, tech etc.; a woman who mentors and strongly supports her loyal team of one, working class Jason; and this is where you know it's fiction, a detective who can't stand Trump or racists, and likes, and goes out of her way to support immigrant communities! Oh, and this was a great dual-case with some really interesting Scotland set police procedural. So I've now read two books in this series, and they both get 8 out of 12, Four Stars from me. The story itself, is complex, a series of almost perfectly timed coincidental meetings which lead Karen to the two cold cases that form the focus of the story. Alongside that, there is a strong social commentary on the condition and terms under which Syrian refugees are accommodated or perhaps more aptly, tolerated, in current society. There is an almost inevitable feeling of where that part of the story will lead, and I wasn’t surprised to see it head there, as sure and true as the Restalrig Railway Path on which it took place. But this was perhaps the only predictable part of the story, the rest of it branching off as series of possibilities, with any one of a number of possible resolutions to the two sordid tales.

More silence. Clearly she was going to have to work at extracting information from Sergeant Torrance. 'An offer of help always gets my day off to a good start. What is it you think you've got?' Ross Garvie,a teenage joy rider,critically ill in hospital,the only survivor of the horrific accident that saw his three mates die,seems to hold the key to their investigation. On her 30th novel . . . none is more deserving of the queen-of-crime mantle than Val McDermid . . . I would like to see a great deal more of DCI Pirie”― Irish Times At the same time, Gabriel Abbott, a loner who often appears confused and obsessed with the turmoil in countries further afield, is found dead. After a short investigation, DI Alan Noble, concludes that it was a suicide on grounds that the individual could appear unstable, had never had a job and was being cared for by his successful brother. It seems that after the death of his mother at a young age, Gabriel lost his way in life, struggling with the world around him.

Meanwhile, Karen finds herself irresistibly drawn to another mystery that she has no business investigating, a mystery that has its roots in a terrorist bombing two decades ago. And again, she finds that nothing is as it seems. There were so many characters that I simply adored. The author is a master of characterisation to the point where you almost feel like you are reading a True Crime story from the POV of each involved in the case!Karen is very good at what she does. She never shies away from a difficult question or a seemingly impossible case. Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, leading the Cold Case Unit has stumbled upon a small plane crash some 20 years ago with all four passengers killed. Forward to current day and it appears the son of one of the victims either committed suicide or was murdered. Karen is also involved in another cold case of a young girl who was brutally murdered with no suspects in sight until DNA emerges from a crash victim. The same clues will be offered many times throughout the chapters, along with forcing the reader to try to understand why other officials in both cases want Karen to stop all the investigating work. Val McDermid has many fans that enjoy her style of writing. When a teenage drunk driver is found to share familial DNA with a rapist twenty years in the past DCI Karen Pirie from the Historic Cases Unit is called upon to hunt down the murderer and give the rape victim’s family some closure. While she and her young assistant DC Jason Murray hunt down leads in what turns out to be a less than clear cut investigation, Pirie is pulled into another case which involves a possible suicide of a young man with links to another cold case from the past. This is Val McDermid's thirtieth novel and the first one I have read. Out of Bounds is the fourth book in a series featuring DCI Karen Pirie but can easily be read as a standalone police procedural. When we first meet the irascible Detective Karen Pirie, she is a hot mess: Her boyfriend and fellow detective has been murdered (we never find out how), her boss is out to get her (we never learn why), she isn’t sleeping, and she is drinking like a fish. Pirie runs the historic cases unit of the Scotland police near single-handedly, her only assistant a bumbling young constable. Yet she apparently doesn’t have enough work of her own to do, because when the case that she is initially investigating stalls out, she finds time to meddle in a non-cold case belonging to another detective from a completely different unit. When a man with mental health problems was found on a park bench with a bullet in his head, the dead-weight detective in charge of the case wrote it off as a suicide. Pirie disagrees and, without notifying that detective or her superiors, launches her own unofficial investigation, even running off to London to interview witnesses in her spare time. (No wonder her boss doesn’t like her.) As the plot gradually unfolds, credulity is strained at every turn. The villain’s motive is thin, his actions bizarre. And with Detective Pirie operating so far outside the norm for a police detective, it ultimately becomes impossible to suspend disbelief. The thing I enjoy most about Val’s books is the strong characters and their intricate relationships, Karen, Carol, Kate, all of them feel like real people. And every time there is a new book out, I just have to have it! Especially with that cliffhanger ending of “The Skeleton Road”. I was so happy that I already had this one on my shelf; the wait would have killed it for me. Overall I’m mostly happy with how everything turned out; even if Karen didn’t get it all. That makes everything just so much more real.