Past Lying (Karen Pirie Book Seven) by Val McDermid

 

Past Lying (Karen Pirie Book Seven) by Val McDermid.

Published 12th October 2023 by Sphere.

From the cover of the book:

Edinburgh, haunted by the ghosts of its many writers, is also the cold case beat of DCI Karen Pirie. So she shouldn't be surprised when an author's manuscript appears to be a blueprint for an actual crime.

Karen can't ignore the plot's chilling similarities to the unsolved case of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there's a problem: the author died before he finished it.

As Karen digs deeper, she uncovers a spiralling game of betrayal and revenge, where lies are indistinguishable from the truth and with more than one unexpected twist . . .

The Queen of Crime Val McDermid is at the top of her game in her most gripping and fiendishly clever case yet.

***********

April, 2020. With the nation in lockdown to control the spread of Covid-19, the Scottish Historic Crimes Unit is whiling away the hours out of the office, mulling over unsolved case files without much success. Then the glimmer of a breakthrough comes their way via an archivist who has found disturbing similarities between the plot of an unpublished manuscript of a famous author, and the unsolved case of the disappearance of a young woman called Lara Hardie some months ago.

From their respective lockdown locations, DCI Karen Pirie, DS Daisy Mortimer, and DC Jason 'Mint' Murray set to work trying to establish if this manuscript holds the key to finding out what happened to Lara, and they discover that there are far too many similarities between fact and fiction to discount this as a coincidence. Could this actually be the confession of cold, calculating killer? Unfortunately, the author in question is now dead and unable to shed any light on how and why his plot about the perfect crime seems to chime so much about the mystery of Lara's disappearance... 

Past Lying picks up shortly after where Still Life left off, with the HCU team trying to negotiate the ups and downs of their personal and professional lives against the background of the unprecedented events of the first Covid lockdown. As the pandemic spreads, Pirie and the gang must do their best to pursue an investigation that throws up all kinds of tricky challenges, especially those that arise from following lockdown guidelines that some people take more seriously than others.

In a stroke of genius, the plot hinges on the world of the crime author, and McDermid has a ball creating some pretty despicable writers to weave her tale around. There are so many scenes about the writing process, the dizzy heights that can be reached when your writing career is on the up, and the dark depths that can come if the toss of the dice sends you plummeting back to obscurity, that its hard not to wonder who McDermid based her characters on - even though she maintains they are fictional. The mind boggles, especially when it comes to the lengths these characters will go to to get that elusive best-seller, and yet there is enough authenticity underlying so many of their shenanigans, that you will be side-eyeing the crime writers who deal in death and mayhem from now on.

As is the way with McDermid's deliciously clever crime stories, this is a novel that pulls you in completely with beautifully contrived twists and turns, before knocking you sideways. But there is so much more, because she knows just how to fill out a story with all the human elements you need to make it a cut above too. It is easy to forget quite how terrifying the world was in 2020, but through the experiences of Pirie and her team all the old unsettled emotions we felt during the Covid lockdown come rushing back with a full on slap - the isolation; the fear; the toll of enforced proximity on more than a few relationships; the impact of loss; and the heartbreak of separation from loved ones. It is spot on! I love the way McDermid really gets to grips with how difficult it must have been to investigate crime in a lockdown too - not something I have thought about before.

I loved this book: it is so darned slick. McDermid makes it look easy, but the characters in this story explore only too well how difficult it is to get crime writing right. It is always a joy to read one of McDermid's books, and this one has certainly been worth the wait. I hope the next Karen Pirie book comes along soon! 

Past Lying is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats.

Thank you to Sphere for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. 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.