Published 4th February 2021 by Sphere.
From the cover of the book:
'The bodies never stay buried forever . . .'On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea. It is quickly discovered that the dead man was the prime suspect in a decade-old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace.
DCI Karen Pirie was the last detective to review the file and is drawn into a sinister world of betrayal and dark secrets. But Karen is already grappling with another case, one with even more questions and fewer answers.
A skeleton has been discovered in an abandoned campervan and all clues point to a killer who never faced justice - a killer who is still out there.
In her search for the truth, Karen uncovers a network of lies that has gone unchallenged for years. But lies and secrets can turn deadly when someone is determined to keep them hidden for good . . .
The number one bestseller and unrivalled queen of crime Val McDermid is back with her most exhilarating, breath-taking thriller yet.
***********
The body of a man is pulled from the Forth estuary one chilly February morning. All the signs point to murder, but his identity is shrouded in mystery, even though his French passport bears the name Paul Allard.
DCI Karen Pirie of the Historic Crimes Unit is reeling from the news that the man who brutally murdered the love of her life is about to be released from prison. Caught between the desire to make him pay for the pain she carries, and her dedication to her job, Pirie is feeling distracted. Then a curious case comes her way. At the house of a woman recently killed in a road traffic accident, skeletal remains have been found inside an old VW van. Who these bones belong to, and how they came to be in the garage of the woman who died is a puzzle. Somewhere out there is killer, and it is going to take a lot of work on the part of Karen and her sidekick Jason to track them down.
Pirie's life gets even more complicated when it appears that the body found in the estuary might be related to the unsolved disappearance of a Scottish civil servant ten years ago. As she was the last person to review the cold case, and her boss fears political ramifications if this brings new evidence to light, Pirie is put in charge of the investigation into the Paul Allard murder on top of her busy work load.
Now pursuing two historic cases, and trying to balance her feelings about relationships old and new, it is going to take all of Pirie's experience and intuition to bring these lines of inquiry to successful ends. Her career is on the line, and both bodies bring dark secrets to the surface... secrets that some will go to great lengths to keep buried.
Val McDermid is at the top of her game in this cracking sixth police procedural in the DCI Karen Pirie series, taking her tenacious historic crimes investigator from Scotland, to London, Paris and Dublin to solve two parallel cases which both unearth dark secrets, crimes of passion, dodgy dealing, and false identities. Along the way, Pirie's team expands to include a brand new character, young and eager DS Daisy Mortimer, who proves to be a great asset in the Allard investigtion, while DC Jason 'Mint' Murray returns as her faithful protogé at the HCU in the body-in-the-van case.
Moving back and forth between the investigative nitty gritty, and broken up with Pirie's struggles to come to terms with upheaval in her personal life, Still Life is as deliciously twisty as you would expect from the legendary crime writier McDermid. This is a masterclass in taut plotting, with both cases proceeding at a perfect pace through intelligently contrived turns. Meticulous police work, backed up with logic, technological wizardry, and good old-fashioned cop hunches uncover the clues needed to drive Pirie and her colleagues onwards, and I found myself totally hooked after only a few pages in.
McDermid floods this delicious book with layer upon layer of themes and social commentary around realtionships, politics, and the differerences between police forces across borders. I particularly enjoyed how she explores forgiveness and coming to terms with sins of the past, alongside the darkest of betrayals, and this book delves nicely into the world of art and the pitfalls that come with ensuring provenance and authencitiy of paintings. As always, Pirie doggedly fighting her corner when it comes to the importance of solving historic crimes is key too.
If you love a slick police procedural that keeps you on your toes, packed with great characters, well conceived twists and plenty of action, then this is definitely the book for you. I cannot wait to continue the story in McDermid's brand new Karen Pirie book, the highly anticipated Past Lying!
Still Life is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to Sphere for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
About the author:
She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.
No comments:
Post a Comment