Out of Bounds

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When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car, a routine DNA test could be the key to unlocking the mystery of a twenty-year-old murder inquiry. Having now read all 4 books via the library I am off to purchase them as they are definitely a revisit book.

But be warned,should you pick up this book,you run the risk of being sleep deprived as you are compelled to read just one more page in your quest to discover 'who dun-nit'! Police in Scotland, as in Ireland, and England, don't always work in the places where they were raised. 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. When some drunken lads steal a Land Rover and then crash it, a blood sample is taken from the driver and routinely checked for DNA matches. Bravado and stupidity takes over and before long, three of the four are dead and the fourth is in a coma with the possibility of being charged with the death of his friends if he ever wakes up.McDermid is precise but never pedantic in her descriptions of the various locales – the novel ricochets around Edinburgh, Fife, Glasgow, Linlithgow and Galashiels with an equally observant trip to London. As she makes tentative attempts at friendship with an old friend who has moved back to manage social work in Fife, she comes across another case.

Only recently discovering the DCI Pirie collection, I have been happy to devour all four books on offer to date. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. 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. Number one bestseller Val McDermid is back with her most gripping, chilling and suspenseful novel yet. As one of the biggest names in crime writing, Val McDermid has written 30 books, has been translated into 30 languages and sold more than 10 million copies of her work worldwide.

In August 2022 McDermid reported that the estate of Agatha Christie had threatened her publishers with legal action if they referred to McDermid as "the Queen of Crime", stating that the term was copyrighted by the Christie estate.