Val McDermid

"A riveting thrill ride of a novel from a captivating new series, 1989 confirms internationally bestselling author Val McDermid as one of crime fiction's true masters. It's 1989 and journalist Allie Burns is growing up. Older and maybe wiser than the hustling young hack we met in 1979, she's running the northern news operation of the Sunday Globe, chafing at losing her role in investigative journalism and at the descent into the gutter of the UK tabloid...

"When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before. It's a cold case that should be straightforward. But it's as twisted as the DNA helix itself. Meanwhile, Karen is mired in grief and guilt after the death of her partner. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to another mystery that she has no business investigating, a mystery that has its...

"An irresistible combination of contemporary psychological thriller and historical mystery filled with the moody atmosphere of the Lake District." —Tess Gerritsen, New York Times–bestselling author
In The Grave Tattoo, suspense master Val McDermid spins a psychological thriller in which a present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty.
After torrential summer rains uncover...

"Is it violence if it's virtual? The outspoken women targeted by the increasingly cruel Internet trolls and bullies would probably say so. For some of them, the torrents of bile and vicious threats prove too much. They begin to silence themselves in a series of high-profile suicides. Or do they? Tony Hill isn't convinced. But he's the only one. Former cop Carol Jordan is too busy messing up her life to care. Until she gets an unexpected second chance....

In this modern retelling of Austen's classic, bookish minister's daughter Cat Morland joins her well-to-do friends in Edinburgh and falls for an up-and-coming lawyer who may harbor unsettling secrets.

"The UK's "Queen of Crime" Val McDermid returns to her propulsive series featuring cold case detective Karen Pirie, who finds herself investigating the shadowy world of forgery, where things are never what they seem. Still Life is intensely gripping from the first page and further proof that McDermid is writing at the top of her game. When a lobster fisherman on an early morning run pulls in his traps, he finds something he wasn't expecting to catch-a...

"[A Darker Domain] combines a thrilling story with heartbreaking questions of social justice and history. "-Seattle Times The New York Times calls Val McDermid, "As smooth a practitioner of crime fiction as anyone out there…the best we've got." Time spent with her extraordinary thriller, A Darker Domain, will prove that it's true. Set in Scotland, the milieu of Ian Rankin's John Rebus, McDermid's brilliant exploration of loyalty and greed intertwines...

"It's April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot-the streets all but empty, an hour's outdoor exercise the maximum allowed-but a mere pandemic doesn't mean crime takes a holiday. When a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie's team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it's game on again. At the center of it, a novel: two crime novelists...

Clinical psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan struggle to recapture celebrity sociopath Jack Vance, who has broken out of prison with the intention of exacting violent revenge.

Bestselling, award-winning author Val McDermid delivers her most stunning story yet in The Distant Echo-an intricate, thought-provoking tale of murder and revenge. Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow blankets St. Andrews School. Student Alex Gilbery and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery....