Aye. One of the officers attending, it was his first fatal RTA. I doubt he'll get much sleep for a wee while. Anyway, the thing is, the driver's still alive. He's in a coma, like, but he's still hanging in there.' Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie walks the streets of Leith in the small hours. She cannot sleep as her lover and colleague, Phil Parhatka, was killed in the last outing in this series ( The Skeleton Road). [1] At night she encounters displaced Syrian refugees in alleyways and under bridges gathered together to try and be a community, as since coming to Scotland, they have nowhere to meet up.

As the book opens, we find DCI Karen Pirie of the Historical Cases Unit still reeling from the recent loss of her partner. By day she buries herself in cold cases & spends her nights walking the streets of Edinburgh. Karen Pirie lost the love of her life recently and she spends her nights walking around in the city trying to come to grips with her loss. That doesn't mean that she isn't doing her damn best to solve cold cases. A joyride crash has given new life to an old rape and murder case. However, finding the answers will not be that easy. Karen is also drawn to a recent murder case that is linked to a terrorist bombing that happened twenty years ago. Could there be a link between the two deeds? I never spook myself, says top Scots crime writer Val McDermid". Daily Record. 31 August 2016 . Retrieved 25 October 2016.McDermid melds the political thriller with the police procedural for an intense novel that . . . feels both intensely personal and global . . . Karen . . . once again proves herself a formidable character worthy of her own series.” Associated Press on The Skeleton Road Driven by a compulsion to solve all crimes, Karen believes that there is more to this case than was initially discovered and just can’t let it lie. Meanwhile, Karen Pirie 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…

Macdonald, Stuart (25 October 2016). "Author Val McDermid gets married to long-term partner Jo Sharp". Daily Record. I loved her relentlessness,her sheer determination to pursue lines that often saw her go off on tangents,only to be returned to where she'd started,once again. McDermid, Val (5 April 2016). "Scotland is now a place where you can be glad to be gay". The Guardian.

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 An] engaging new novel...McDermid’s 30th novel offers fascinating insights into the ethical dilemmas thrown up by advances in forensic science”― Sunday Times (UK)

Val McDermid is simply one of the best crime writers around. I have loved every book she's written. She has a number of series. Out of Bounds is the fourth novel featuring Inspector Karen Pirie. But you could absolutely read this as a stand alone. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Out of Bounds by Val McDermid for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. Karen,grieving the death of her work and life partner,Phil,is sceptical of the coincidence of the two deaths and begins an investigation of her own. Is Gabriel's death a straight forward suicide as it appears,or is there indeed a more sinister explanation for his death?An enthralling, twisty read, Out of Bounds reaffirms Val McDermid’s place as one of the most dependable professionals in the mystery and thriller business.