Showing results by author "Val McDermid" in All Categories

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

Kate Brannigan is having a bad weekend, her boyfriend's death notice is in the newspaper, her plans to capture a team of heartless fraudsters are in disarray, and a Celtic neo-punk band want her to rescue them from saboteurs. As if that isn't enough, Kate's business partner wants her to buy him out so he can emigrate to Australia, and private eyes with principles never have that kind of cash. Kate can't even cry on her best friend's shoulder, for Alexis has worries of her own. Confronting betrayal and greed, Kate fights to save her livelihood and her life.

When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years before. Finding the answer to the cold case should be straightforward. But it's as twisted as the DNA helix itself. 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.

A killer is on the loose, blurring the line between fact and fiction. His prey - the writers of crime novels who have turned psychological profilers into the heroes of the nineties. But this killer is like no other. His bloodlust shatters all the conventional wisdom surrounding the motives and mechanics of how serial killers operate. And for one woman, the desperate hunt to uncover his identity becomes a matter of life and death.

As a favor to her rock journalist boyfriend, Thai-boxing, rock-and-roll private detective Kate Brannigan agrees to track down a missing song-writer Moira Pollock, a search that takes her into some of the seediest parts of Leeds and Bradford. But little does she realize that finding Moira is only a prelude to murder. Juggling her other cases, including a search to uncover the source of counterfeit luxury goods, Brannigan finds herself for the first time on the trail of a killer.

The year started badly and only got worse - blizzards, strikes, power cuts, and political unrest were the norm. For journalist Allie Burns, however, someone else's bad news was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking, and the year is ripe with possibilities. But Allie is a woman in a man's world. Desperate to get away from the "women's stories" the Glasgow desk keeps assigning her, she strikes up an alliance with wannabe investigative journalist Danny Sullivan. From the start, their stories create enemies.

The Sounds of Crime is an exclusive collection of five brand new short stories by some of the best crimewriters around. Using the theme of 'audio', this unique collection features brand new stories by Lawrence Block, Peter James, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Christopher Fowler.

Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find …

In Broken Ground, cold-case Detective Karen Pirie faces her hardest challenge yet. Six feet under in a Highland peat bog lies Alice Somerville’s inheritance, buried by her grandfather at the end of World War II. But when Alice finally uncovers it, she finds an unwanted surprise - a body with a bullet hole between the eyes. Meanwhile, DCI Pirie is called in to unravel a case where nothing is quite as it seems. And as she gets closer to the truth, it becomes clear that not everyone shares her desire for justice. Or even the idea of what justice is.

This was the summer he discovered what he wanted—at a gruesome museum of criminology far off the beaten track of more timid tourists. Visions of torture inspired his fantasies like a muse. It would prove so terribly fulfilling. The bodies of four men have been discovered in the town of Bradfield. Enlisted to investigate is criminal psychologist Tony Hill. Even for a seasoned professional, the series of mutilation sex murders is unlike anything he's encountered before.

In the center of historic Edinburgh, builders are preparing to convert a disused Victorian Gothic building into luxury flats. They are understandably surprised to find skeletal remains hidden in a high pinnacle that hasn't been touched by maintenance for years. But who do the bones belong to, and how did they get there? Could the eccentric British pastime of free climbing the outside of buildings play a role? Enter cold case detective Karen Pirie, who gets to work trying to establish the corpse's identity.

Karen Pirie is the newly appointed Deputy Inspector of the Cold Case Unit, and her first investigation takes her 25 years into the past to the national miners’ strike. At the time, a kidnapping gone wrong left a small boy missing, but new evidence suggests he might still be alive. As Pirie delves deeper, she realizes the boy’s disapperance may be linked to another cold case involving a missing miner.

Bodyguarding had never made it to Manchester PI Kate Brannigan's wish list. But somebody's got to pay the bills at Brannigan & Co., and if the only earner on offer is playing nursemaid to a paranoid soap star, the fast-talking, computer-loving, white-collar-crime expert has to swallow her pride and slip into something more glam than her Thai-boxing kit. Soon, however, offstage dramas overshadow the fictional storylines, culminating in the unscripted murder of the self-styled "Seer to the Stars", and Kate finds herself with more questions than answers.

English kick-boxer and Rudyard Kipling fan Kate Brannigan appears in her fourth adventure, chasing down art thieves in Italy while unravelling a nasty case of product tampering in her homeland. When a precious Monet painting is nicked from a posh British estate where she arranged the security, the tough-talking PI is right on the job to get it back.

Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger Award-winning author Val McDermid pens thrilling mysteries eagerly devoured by fans. In the sixth novel in her Tony Hill series—the inspiration for the hit British television show Wire in the Blood—psychologist Tony Hill and Detective Carol Jordan’s investigation of a teenage girl’s murder leads them to an Internet predator.

In Trick of the Dark, forensic psychiatrist Charlotte Flint is in desperate need of a distraction after her testimony in a high-profile case comes under fire, threatening her career. Enter Dr. Corinna Newsam, an old professor of Charlotte’s who is convinced her son-in-law was murdered by her daughter’s new lover.

After torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, a long-disregarded old wives' tale takes on a chilling new plausibility. For centuries, Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian, made infamous by Mutiny on the Bounty, staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. And once there, what if he could tell his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem—a poem that remained hidden lest it expose Wordsworth to the gallows for harboring a fugitive?

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions—a healer, a weaver, and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her—because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. As the net closes in, what unfurls is a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre, and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland.

Legendary editor, Maxim Jakubowski, delivers another chilling anthology collecting stories of cold-blooded murder, revenge and crimes-gone-wrong from the best of the best in crime fiction. Spine-chilling and gripping, these tales will grip you with their devious narrators and crafty twists.

Spraining an ankle is rarely a stroke of luck, but for Lindsay Gordon, jobless in Glasgow, the injury is her introduction to young freelance journalist Rory McLaren and the opening of a new chapter in her life. But when a local car dealer's stepson is kidnapped, Lindsay and Rory are invited to trade journalism for detection. The trail leads them to St. Petersburg and a dangerous snatch-back operation. It's a journey that brings a whole new dimension of risk into Lindsay's life.