Opening one of Val McDermid’s police procedurals – especially those featuring Police Scotland’s Karen Pirie and her dedicated team in the Historic Cases Unit – is like being driven to a rewarding destination in a luxury limo. Everything works flawlessly, with no plot holes or linguistic bumps in the road. In her new thriller, Silent Bones, McDermid delivers another smooth ride.
A brief prologue describes a young woman’s ill-fated decision, back in 2013, to attend a posh party organised by supporters of Scotland’s independence referendum. But we leave her facing an uncertain future at the hands of a future Lord and a comedy star. From there, we’re brought a dozen years forward when torrential rains wash out part of the M73 in Glasgow, revealing a skeleton. No doubt a historic crime, as it must have been there since the road was last paved.
Meanwhile, the New Zealand brother of an accident victim has arrived in Edinburgh to challenge Police Scotland’s conclusions about his brother’s death, which happened before the pandemic. He has CCTV photos of his brother leaving the hotel he managed and again at the bottom of the Scotsman Steps, a spiral staircase with more than a hundred shallow marble steps. The police concluded Tom Jamieson died on those steps when he slipped and fell.
Murder, the brother says. He points to photos showing the same hoodie-wearing man leaving the hotel behind Jamieson and walking away from the Steps shortly before Jamieson’s body was found. The brother’s reverse image search identified the stranger: a semi-respectable medical technology manufacturer.
At this point, if you’re familiar with McDermid’s stories, you’ll be wondering how the dead hotel manager and the roadside body might be linked. Before too long, the skeleton’s DNA reveals he was a wanted man. An investigative journalist, Sam Nimmo was believed to have murdered his pregnant partner and used his undercover contacts to disappear.
Now Pirie knows he hadn’t done a runner; he lay murdered and under the motorway all along. The explanation for Rachel’s death is disintegrating too. What makes more sense seems to be to find out what he’d been working on, whether he’d uncovered some dangerous secret.
Meanwhile, the only anomaly in Jamieson’s recent past is that he’d been accepted into a shadowy book club limited to 12 members. A place for him opened when a prominent architect died in a car crash in the Highlands. Hmmm. The book club members all hold prominent places in the Scottish establishment. Intriguingly, one is a road-building contractor, but that is a string that doesn’t get pulled.
Meticulous research is needed for Karen and her cohorts Daisy and Jason to track down the family members, work colleagues, undercover journalists, original investigators and associates of this expanding group of people who died in now-questionable circumstances. All this against the backdrop of the independence movement.
The investigative team members pick their way from one interview to the next like following a set of steppingstones in a fast-moving creek. Each step reveals some new bit of information. Anticipating how each bit will be interpreted when put together with the others keeps the story moving and, though the book is more than 400 pages long, I raced through it in just a few evenings.
The investigation engages me most in this type of story, but there’s also humour in the relationships among the investigators – and lots of snacks, too – as well as warmth in their relationships outside the office. Jason and his partner Meera. Daisy and her partner Steph. In one instance, though, I worried that Daisy was sharing too many details with Steph and whether that might come back to bite her.
If you’ve read others in this eight-part series, you’ll know Karen is in a long-distance relationship with a Syrian doctor she saved from assassins. He’s now working in Canada, waiting for a passport. Her way of dealing with the pain of their separation is to bury herself in her work, and there’s plenty of it here.
I’m glad Pirie’s new boss appreciates her, even if only because her cases attract good publicity. I can believe in these well-developed, three-dimensional characters and hope people like them are at the core of real-life public safety organisations. An exciting read!
Also see Her Sister’s Killer by Mari Hannah or Murder at the Black Cat Café by Seishi Yokomizo.
Sphere
Print/Kindle/iBook
£11.76
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
