Nadat ik wat minder enthousiast was over het vorige deel van de Jordan/Hill reeks, ben ik nu wel weer enthousiast. Goed verhaal, actueel ook omdat de slachtoffers via het internet (social media) worden gevonden en ook de persoonlijke verhalen zijn weer wat uitgediept. Ik ben meer te weten gekomen...
This is probably my favorite of the series, though I had to skip books 4 & 5, as my library lacks them. I was worried I'd have a hard time catching up, but having read the first three, I found that my knowledge of Carol, Tony and their relationship was enough to get me deeply engaged in this book...
My favorite Val McDermid novels are the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, but I enjoyed this one almost as much. I did find the flashbacks to be a bit confusing at times, and I kept mixing up the journalist's and the detective's investigations, but overall I was able to keep the story sorted out. I ...
It's interesting that some authors, like Michael Connelly, can write an amazing series of thrillers (the Harry Bosch's), while his other books in the same genre are pretty mundane, leaning toward bad. I've read a lot of Val McDermid, and she fits the same mold. This is definitely not one of her ...
Phew! finished. This book is set against the backdrop of the 1980's miners strike in Scotland and all the hardship it entailed. Murder and abduction are investigated as a cold case from those days and there are many unanswered questions. Val McDermid pulled it out of the hat again. Her plot is a ...
Considering it's been a while since I last read anything by Val McDermid I tend to forget what a truly great storyteller she is. The stand alone thrillers of her's that I've read before have varied from being a great read to an outstanding mnd blowing experience. What gets me is for a seasoned th...
Quite a decent mystery read, with the improbable twist that five of the main characters are Lesbians. This is mainly to illustrate that, just like all people Lesbians run the gamut from good to bad and struggle against all of the same relationship problems, work place dilemmas. and other moral q...
Can we just say *** PLACEHOLDER *** to all her books now? Um. Quick recollection: apt, echoing title on many levels. Multi-layered plot set in Europe, mostly Berlin. A serial killer whose own suffering might just have been a bit worse than the one he later inflicted. A modern high-flyer criminal ...
3.5/5 starsOn a cold snowy morning in St Andrews, Scotland in 1978, four drunk university boys returning home from a party, stumbled on a young barmaid fatally stabbed in the local cemetery. She died before help could arrive and the witnesses themselves became the prime suspects. Lack of evidence...
Second in this series about Manchester-based PI Kate Brannigan, this has her investigating 3 separate cases: one fizzles out as someone else solves it for her, while the other two - missing conservatories, and a friends lost property deposit - which both involve highly confusing mortgage scams - ...
This is the first of the Lindsay Gordon series that I've read, and I found it very different to the Tony Hill series, which I've really enjoyed. The central character is a journalist who has moved back to Glasgow from the USA because of her girlfriends career. At a loose end for work, she meets a...
This was the second in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series. Tony Hill is teaching the art of psychological "profiling" to a small group of young police officers, who show varying degrees of interest and acceptance. One, however, a young live-wire called Shaz Bowman, believes she has identified the ...
Lindsay Gordon, Scottish journalist and amateur sleuth, was the first creation of international bestseller Val McDermid. Report for Murder introduced the United Kingdom’s first lesbian detective, and the series has been perennially popular ever since. Lindsay is tenacious to the point of stubborn...
Third in the Kate Brannigan series, and more interesting than the last one, this has her investigating a drugs ring when her boyfriend Richard is arrested for driving a car with 2kg of crack in the boot. She drags in some of her friends that we've met in previous books to help when Richard's son ...
The Grave Tattoo, by Val McDermid B-plus.Jane Gresham is a Wordsworth scholar. There has been a rumor that she has heard since childhood that Fletcher Christian, of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame, made his way back to England, and that Wordsworth aided him in staying hidden and not arrested for the...
I have given this 4 stars, and must ask myself why, rather than 5 such as I gave to The Wire In The Blood and The Last Temptation.This is book 4 of a series that currently stands at 9 books. The first was published in 1995, the 9th just a few weeks ago in 2015. She's not churning them out putting...
I enjoyed this just as much as the first of the series, Report for Murder. It's a fun, easy read, again featuring Lindsay Gordon, self-proclaimed cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist. It has the same sharp wit and sarcasm as previously, and despite its Cold War era datedness, the plot is...
A Place Of Execution by Val McDermidMy dad (who reads two, maybe three books a week) told me that this was the best mystery he’d read in a long time. With an endorsement like that, who was I to argue? He tossed the book my wa...
I had never heard of Val McDermid before reading one of the Stieg Larsson books, and a scene where Mikael Blomqvist sits down and cracks one open. I took that as an endorsement. So this is the first of her I've read, and it has many flaws. The story itself isn't terrible, though quite farfetch...
This turned out to be a sort of stealth reread, since before I got to the second chapter I had a sudden vision of exactly how it ended, without any particular memory of what happened in between. Not so very much, as it turned out--the only mystery-solving takes place in a single and complete fla...
I think I've read ONE (or maybe two) or Val McDermid's early mysteries featuring Lindsey Gordon, a Brit lefty lesbian journalist in the 1980s (I could almost use the 'historical mysteries' tag now). Not this one, though, and not the next one I am about to review. It's interesting to me how this...
The last of her enjoyable Kate Brannigan series, and for some reason I had only this one in my shelf, though I had read them all last century, at least in translation. Kate is/was my favourite of her female characters. I had only read one of McDermid's first series (Lindsay), and it seemed dry, d...
I love Lindsay's character like whoa, but she's even better when she has a partner in inquiry. Beyond being just a sounding board, though, Sophie really grew on me in this book. Much more than Cordelia did in the previous books. Cordelia played more of the dense follower (with rather a tone of re...
Lindsay Gordon, Scottish journalist and amateur sleuth, was the first creation of international bestseller Val McDermid. Report for Murder introduced the United Kingdom’s first lesbian detective, and the series has been perennially popular ever since. Lindsay is tenacious to the point of stubborn...
While trying to find a new business partner, Kate tackles three cases: a fly-posting scam, a burial scam, and a murder case involving a murdered fertility specialist. This last was particularly interesting to me since my own Seminal Murder also features such a scientist. McDermid's scientist, how...
The residents of Bradfield are devastated when their star midfielder dies, the victim of a bizarre, seemingly motiveless murder. In a hospital, recovering from injuries, criminal profiler and psychologist Dr. Tony Hill struggles to make sense of the fragments of information he can gather in ord...
I do not think that they will sing to me. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ T. S. Eliot The soul of torture is male Comment on exhibit cardThe Museum of Criminology and Torture, San Gimignano, Italy. All chapter epigraphs are taken from ‘On Murder considered as one of the fine arts’ by Th...
Somewhere inside there I’d find the end of the ball of string that would unravel to reveal a killer. Eventually, he let me in and directed me to the administration offices. Trevor Kerr’s secretary was already at her desk when I walked in at twenty-five past eight. Unfortunately, her boss wasn’t. ...
One always drives, the other is invariably the passenger, or the driving is shared along prearranged demarcation lines, or one drives except when they’ve been drinking. The passenger navigates or stays out of it; the passenger criticises the driving either directly, or indirectly, by drawing thei...
‘I need a DI, Kevin. Paula’s not ready. But you? You know what’s needed. You lost the chance to show what you could do. If you come back for me, I’ll make you an inspector. You’ll get the rank, the salary and the pension. And when you’ve had enough, this place will still be here. The Frazer what’...
Working with Karen Pirie previously had meant she’d had to ‘borrow’ the facilities at Dundee University, where the old entity, Fife Police, had handed off much of its forensic work. Presuming on that relationship again had left her in a state of envy for the facilities a campaigning head of depar...
It wasn’t that she wanted to be. It wasn’t as if she believed in Santa and expected to catch him coming down the chimney onto the coal-effect gas fire in the livingroom. After all, she was nearly eight now. She felt scornful as she thought back to last Christmas when she’d...
You know the kind of thing my life of hell as the falsely accused Hampstead Heath killer. And on the strength of that, he’s gone off to Spain, allegedly to get away from all the pressure. Of course, we’ve been keeping tabs on him, albeit at arms’ length, and according to the tra...
The usual routine in murders like this is that the word creeps out. That’s how the Jack Farrells of this world create the fear that lets them exercise power. First the villains get to know. Then it filters down to us through our snouts and our undercover cops. There might not be any proof, but ev...
Her trip to London had been exhausting enough to make sleep seem like a distinct possibility, but she knew guilt would niggle at her till she’d managed to get contact details for the Syrians so Craig Grassie could get to work on their problem.And so, instead of going home, luxuriating in a fragra...
All he knew about it was that they had a Premier League football team that usually bumped along somewhere in the middle of the table. Raking up history lessons from school, he vaguely remembered it had grown rich in the nineteenth century on textiles, though he couldn’t recall whether it was cott...
Looking around the courtroom, George was struck by the astonishment on the faces of the Scardale villagers who had turned up in force. They had come to satisfy some primeval urge, to see the man they cast as villain in the dock. They required ceremony to assuage that urge, but there in a modern c...
Cursing, Paula slotted the car into a disabled slot and propped a sign saying ‘police’ on the dashboard. It went against the grain, but then so did getting soaked to the skin on semi-official business. She consoled herself with the thought that not many disabled people would fancy negotiating the...
The woman who was bearing down on me was a good three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than me and there was a mean look in her eyes. I tried to match her glare and circled her warily. She feinted a punch at me, but that opened up her defenses and I swung my leg up and round in a short, fa...