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Out of Bounds

Out of Bounds

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That was part of the point. She had chosen to move to Edinburgh precisely because it was unfamiliar. Deciding to live here had felt like a project. Learning the city one street at a time might take her mind off the grief and the pain. When she and her colleague begin to delve beneath the surface,what they discover takes them on a diverging course that makes them privy to the fury and humiliation of fellow officers,the ire of their commanding officers,and the wilful determination of the person responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Meanwhile Karen finds herself irresistibly drawn to another case, one that she has no business investigating. And as she pieces together decades-old evidence, Karen discovers the most dangerous kinds of secrets. Secrets that someone is willing to kill for . . . 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. 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.

McDermid balances the intense character studies in Out of Bounds with an inside view of the Scottish legal system and again shows her acuity in producing intelligent thrillers.”— Associated Press I never spook myself, says top Scots crime writer Val McDermid". Daily Record. 31 August 2016 . Retrieved 25 October 2016. The Hook - Val McDermid is one of my adopted authors at my hometown public library. I really love the stand-alones and non-fiction McDermid writes but have dipped in and out of her series for years. McDermid is an outstanding author who may just be the Queen of Crime after having lost Ruth Rendell and P.D. James.

This wayward and entertaining mystery has the grace of a heroine on the verge of coming into her own as a character whom readers will want to spend time with.

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?' 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.

I loved McDermid's writing style.She doles out just enough information to keep you in the investigative loop but still mystified as to how all the pieces will fit together. Her Karen Pirie is a rough around the edges, loaded down with baggage insomniac. She’s also quite brilliant and not afraid to stand up to her superiors or bend the rules to obtain the information she needs to solve her case and ensure justice is achieved. I loved how the DNA angle ends up playing a role in the case she covertly investigates in parallel to the one to which she is assigned. I loved how Karen copes with a numpty of an assistant and how she comes to Jason’s aid when he puts their investigation in jeopardy and brings Karen’s superiors barking at her heels. I even liked the Syrian refugee subplot generated thanks to Pirie’s late night strolls through the streets of Edinburgh. 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.

Bringing together grief, terrorism, murder, justice and forensics, the plot takes off when a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma and a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years ago. The answer to the cold case is “as twisted as the DNA helix itself”. A mystery rooted in a terrorist bombing two decades ago is also simultaneously investigated.DCI Karen Pirie and her colleague DC Jason ‘The Mint’ Murray make up Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, based in Edinburgh. When a teenage joyrider ends up in hospital, a routine DNA analysis finds a link to a twenty year old unsolved murder. Karen, still grieving the loss of her lover and colleague Phil, needs the distraction of work, but also can’t resist getting involved in a recent investigation when she discovers the dead man’s mother was also murdered years earlier. With her senior officer just waiting to catch her out, Karen doesn’t hesitate to bend, if not break the rules, and call on her network of clever friends, to get to the truth - but someone is just as determined to stop her... Val McDermid is a favourite author of mine. Not only do I love her books and the way they have been brought to life for TV, I actually really enjoy listening to her talk. She inspires me with the way she comes up with new ideas and story-lines although I will admit, it was not until I had watched my first episode of Wire in the Blood that I discovered her as an author. 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. Out of Bounds is a topnotch police procedural led by a Scottish cold case detective who uses her innate intelligence to resolve crimes. While the mysteries behind these crimes play a substantive role, DCI Karen Pirie is the star of this book.

There's also a strand in the book about some of the Syrian refugees who have come to Scotland fleeing from the horrors in their own country. McDermid handles this very well, showing them not as potential terrorists, rapists, murderers or religious fanatics, but as normal people who have seen and experienced terrible things, but survived, and who now want to find a way to build new lives for themselves and their families in a safer place. This is a complex story with a multitude of threads all running at the same time. Val McDermid has not simply created another novel, she has spent time, as she always does, making sure that all of her facts are correct, researching the issues that could arise with DNA discovery and really thinking about how, as surely must be the case on occasion, one terrible crime uncovers another that on first sight appears completely unrelated. Would We Recommend Out of Bounds? The plotting is great, with enough complexity to keep the reader guessing but without ever straying far over the credibility line. Although there are two separate cases on the go, McDermid juggles them well, never letting one be forgotten at the expense of the other. And personally, I'm delighted to see her set a series in her native Scotland. She doesn't shine a light on the political zeitgeist in quite the way Rankin often does, but she creates a clear and authentic picture of contemporary Scotland, particularly with regards to policing and justice systems. Meanwhile, up in Dundee a tragic accident involving some joyriders leads to some new evidence on a cold case from Glasgow, some twenty years earlier. A DNA match which proves not to be the easy answer that Karen had initially hoped it would be. THE AUTHOR: Val McDermid is a popular Scottish author who was born on June 04, 1955 in Fife, Scotland, United Kingdom. She is particularly famous for writing all her novels in the Mystery, crime and Thriller genres.The voice at the other end had the unmistakable vowels of Dundee. 'Aye, this is Sergeant Torrance from Tayside. Traffic Division.' He stopped abruptly, as if he'd given her enough information to be going on with. 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!



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