Edited by Lee Child. Simon & Schuster, $27 (464p) ISBN 978-1-5011-4159-1
Each of the 11 collaborative tales in this stellar sequel to the International Thriller Writers’ anthology FaceOff (2014) pairs a top-rank female thriller writer with a male counterpart. Sandra Brown’s Lee Coburn and C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett send...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author St. Martin's Press $16.95 (207p) ISBN 978-0-312-08754-8
Set in Manchester, England, which its natives claim as the home of rock 'n' roll, the forthright and unpretentious sleuth introduced in this fast-paced story is sure to win readers' hearts. Kate Brannigan is hired by rock legend Jett to locate his...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $26 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2716-7
At the start of Diamond Dagger Award–
winner McDermid’s stirring 10th novel featuring Det. Chief Insp. Carol Jordan and profiler Tony Hill (after 2015’s Splinter the Silence), office manager Kathryn McCormick meets an attractive man at a friend’s...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2574-3
At the outset of Scottish author McDermid’s engaging if at times overstuffed third Karen Pirie novel (after 2014’s The Skeleton Road), 17-year-old Ross Garvie and three mates steal a Land Rover after a night of drinking in Dundee. The subsequent...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2408-1
Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, a former detective chief constable, still aren’t on speaking terms in their solid ninth outing (after 2013’s Cross and Burn), despite the closeness they once shared. Tony continues his clinical psychological work in...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Grove, $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2391-6
In this gruesomely fascinating book, former journalist and renowned suspense novelist McDermid (The Skeleton Road) explains the science behind solving crimes. Based on interviews with crime scene investigators, such as a man who gathers maggots off...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2309-1
The discovery of a man’s skeleton atop an Edinburgh building slated for demolition kick-starts Diamond Dagger Award–winner McDermid’s hit-or-miss follow-up to 2008’s A Darker Domain. Det. Chief Insp. Karen Pirie identifies the remains as those of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Grove, $25 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2301-5
Scottish crime writer McDermid (Cross and Burn) adeptly reworks Jane Austen's Gothic satire for the modern audiences. A homeschooled minister's daughter bored by the "narrow confines" of the Dorset countryside and her "deeply average and desperately
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2204-9
McDermid’s fiendishly clever eighth novel featuring forensic psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan (after The Retribution) finds the two partners on the outs. Jordan has resigned from the Bradfield, England, police force and taken up a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Grove/Atlantic Monthly, $25 (448p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2052-6
Putting her series characters Tony Hill and Carol Jordan on the back burner temporarily, McDermid (The Retribution) delivers a solid stand-alone combining the high-stakes hunt for a missing child with the dark underbelly of celebrity culture....
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2017-5
The return of serial killer Jacko Vance drives McDermid’s superb seventh novel featuring Dr. Tony Hill and Det. Chief Insp. Carol Jordan of the Bradfield police (after 2010’s Fever of the Bone). Vance, the charming TV talk show host responsible for...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Bywater (www.bywaterbooks.com), $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-932859-95-9; $14.95 trade paper ISBN 978-1-932859-82-9
In McDermid's crafty stand-alone thriller, psychiatrist Charlotte "Charlie" Flint gives expert testimony at the Leicester murder trial of Bill Hopton that contributes to his acquittal. When Hopton later kills several women, the ensuing uproar leads...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author LPC Group $10.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-883523-17-6
Returning to Glasgow from a self-imposed exile to avoid the political flap set off by events in Common Murder (1995), freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon discovers her world melodramatically upended. Her lover, Cordelia Brown, author of a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author HarperCollins Publishers $22 (0p) ISBN 978-0-06-101174-0
McDermid (A Clean Break) enters new ground with a dark tale that is more complex, more carefully crafted and far more disturbing than her Kate Brannigan mysteries. By the time the police admit that Bradfield, a fictional city in northern England,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author St. Martin's Press $17.95 (211p) ISBN 978-0-312-09836-0
``The Case of the Missing Conservatories'' is what lively and likeable Kate Brannigan, the English detective from Manchester introduced in Dead Beat , calls this, her second adventure, which founders a bit in tangled plot lines. Hired by...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author St. Martin's Press $16.95 (212p) ISBN 978-0-312-05487-8
This intriguing second novel by the author of Report for Murder again casts lesbian Scottish journalist Lindsay Gordon. Lindsay is living temporarily in Italy when fellow writer Alison Maxwell is found strangled in Glasgow and the victim's ex-lover,
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $24.95 (448p) ISBN 978-0-312-29089-4
British author McDermid brings back DCI Carol Jordan and psychological profiler Dr. Tony Hill from The Mermaids Singing
(1995) and The Wire in the Blood
(1997) and thrusts them into a psychologically chilling and multifaceted thriller. Jordan goes
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $24.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-312-30199-6
This absorbing psychological novel of revenge shows British author McDermid (A Place of Execution) at the top of her form. In part one, set in 1978 in St. Andrews, Scotland, four drunken male students, friends since childhood, stumble over the raped
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-312-33919-7
British author McDermid, whose The Wire in the Blood
has become the best of actor Robson Greer's omnipresent TV outings, has published most recently a gripping stand-alone, The Distant Echo
(2003). Now she continues her engrossing series about
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $24.95 (390p) ISBN 978-0-312-33921-0
An intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England's Lake District. Scholar Jane Gresham pursues her theory that HMS Bounty
mutineer Fletcher Christian returned secretly from...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . Harper $24.95 (355p) ISBN 978-0-06-168898-0
When Michelle Gibson reports her father, Mick Prentice, missing at the start of McDermid's intricate but underwhelming stand-alone psychological thriller, Det. Insp. Karen Pirie, head of the Fife police Cold Case Review Team, isn't...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . Harper $14.99 (484p) ISBN 978-0-06-168897-3
McDermid's exhilarating fifth novel to feature Det. Chief Insp. Carol Jordan and Dr. Tony Hill (after The Torment of Others
) finds Tony in the hospital after being attacked by an ax-wielding patient. Tony's eager to distract himself with...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Harper, $14.99 paper (512p) ISBN 978-0-06-198648-2
A new chief constable, James Blake, arrives at Bradfield CID in McDermid's excellent sixth Tony Hill novel (after Beneath the Bleeding). Since Blake takes a skeptical view of both Tony's contributions as a medical consultant and the team's...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author Scribner Book Company $20 (220p) ISBN 978-0-684-19756-2
British PI Kate Brannigan persuades her lover, Richard, to help out in an investigation of auto-financing fraud. He agrees and ends up in jail, busted for possessing two kilos of crack he didn't know were stashed in the car he was driving. Kate...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author Scribner Book Company $20 (288p) ISBN 978-0-684-80461-3
Fast-talking, kick-boxing Kate Brannigan, a PI in Manchester, England, returns (after Crack Down) in a cleanly written, fast-paced escapade. Cut from the same cloth as Kinsey Milhone, though somewhat less of a loner and possessed of a more demanding
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author Scribner Book Company $21.5 (304p) ISBN 978-0-684-83398-9
After The Mermaids Singing (see Forecasts, Oct. 28), her harrowing Gold Dagger winner, McDermid returns to her Manchester PI Kate Brannigan (last seen in Clean Break) for a fast-paced joyride that swoops and curves past (or right over) villains with
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author Minotaur Books $24.95 (404p) ISBN 978-0-312-26632-5
This superb novel should make Gold Dagger-nominee McDermid's reputation and bring her new readers in droves. It's December 1963 and teenage girls all over Britain are swooning to the Beatles' ""I Want to Hold Your Hand."" In the tiny, remote village
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author St. Martin's Press $16.95 (196p) ISBN 978-0-312-03888-5
This promising debut from a British writer introduces Lindsay Gordon, who mockingly describes herself as ``a cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist.'' Commissioned to write a story on Derbyshire House Girls' School in the North of England,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $24.95 (422p) ISBN 978-0-312-26615-8
Though McDermid skillfully alternates point of view and creates memorable scenes and complex characters, her latest falls short of the high standard set by her previous novel, A Place of Execution
(2000), which was an Edgar finalist. Psychology...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author, Val McDemud, Author Spinsters Ink Books $12 (264p) ISBN 978-1-883523-30-5
In 1984, after the traumatizing death of her closest friend, amateur sleuth and former reporter Lindsay Gordon left England for California. Nine years later, she finds herself back in her homeland, gathering data for her doctoral thesis. At a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author, Gerard Doyle, Read by , read by Gerard Doyle. Audio Renaissance $29.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-59397-678-1
The latest addition to McDermid's dark and gritty police procedurals, which have become even more popular thanks to the BBC America TV program The Wire in the Blood
, finds the series' usual main protagonists, psychologist/profiler Dr. Tony...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid, Author, Francisco Martin Arribas, Translator Rba Libros $10.99 (586p) ISBN 978-84-7871-768-2
It's December 1963 and teenage girls all over Britain are swooning to the Beatles' ""I Want to Hold Your Hand."" In the tiny, remote village of Scardale, Derbyshire, 13-year-old Alison Carter is envied by her peers because her stepfather buys her...
READ FULL REVIEW
Naomi Alderman et al. Morrow, $28.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-313605-2
In this disappointing anthology of authorized pastiches featuring Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, some contributors fail to play fair with readers by not sharing the clues the elderly amateur sleuth relies on, and almost none of the tales effectively
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $26 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2912-3
In McDermind’s fine fourth novel featuring Edinburgh Det. Chief Insp. Karen Pirie (after 2016’s Out of Bounds), Alice and Will Somerville, a married couple, set out on a treasure hunt in the Scottish Highlands. They have a map to guide them to the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $28 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4761-5
In Edgar-finalist McDermid’s riveting 11th Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novel (after 2017’s Insidious Intent), developers digging on the grounds of the shuttered Order of the Blessed Pearl convent, near Bradfield, England, uncover more than 30...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (144p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6429-2
Scottish crime writer McDermid (the Karen Pirie series) provides a middling origin story for Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who was inspired by real-life medieval Scottish queen Gruoch. Following Macbeth’s slaying of King Duncan in battle, rival armies
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid and Kathryn Briggs. Atlantic Monthly, $17 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-8021-5872-7
Scottish crime writer McDermid (the Tony Hill series) takes a stab at bio-noir in this spare but riveting graphic novel tracking a pandemic. Zoe, a dreadlocked freelance journalist, foreshadows “this was where the end began” from ground zero: A...
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $27 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8021-5902-1
Set in 1979, this sterling series launch from McDermid (Still Life) introduces Allison “Allie” Burns, a new reporter for the Clarion newspaper in Glasgow. Fresh from Cambridge University, Allie impresses her colleague Danny Sullivan with her writing
READ FULL REVIEW
Val McDermid. Atlantic Monthly, $27 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6010-2
McDermid’s stellar sequel to 2021’s 1979 finds Allie Burns, now a seasoned journalist, removed from her investigative post at Glasgow’s Clarion by its narcissistic owner to a post in Manchester, England. Resentful, she begins to rethink her future...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
