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Out of Bounds

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In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery. The DNA of the offender leads Pirie to an unsolved rape/murder of a hairdresser from Partick in 1996. This wayward and entertaining mystery has the grace of a heroine on the verge of coming into her own as a character whom readers will want to spend time with. The fourth in the DCI Karen Pirie series, this was a fast-paced and engrossing read with a decently twisty plot and great character development. BY pure co-incidence, while she is there, Karen learns about a new case, a man who has a very tragic and unresolved event in his past.

Karen Pirie is an excellent character, perhaps my favourite of all the various lead characters McDermid has created over the years. It seems that after the death of his mother at a young age, Gabriel lost his way in life, struggling with the world around him. 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. It occurred to her that her life had come to resemble the first draft of an advertising script for Guinness or Stella Artois.Except that there was no brightly lit pub full of cheery faces waiting to greet her at the end of her wanderings. Red tape starts to get in the way and before she can unlock the details that she hopes will solve this cold case she has to jump through numerous legal hoops, leaving a string of upset people in her wake. McDermid has sold over 11m books to date, according to the publisher, translated into 30 languages, and in 2016 was honoured with the Outstanding Contribution award at the Theakston’s Harrogate Crime Festival. The plotting is great, with enough complexity to keep the reader guessing but without ever straying far over the credibility line. Her books combine ironclad storytelling technique, cogent commentaries on modern society and an attitude to the crime genre's long history that is both interrogative and innovative .

Here, the aforementioned “conflict of rights” is explored with admirable subtlety: on one hand, allowing the police to see the adoption records might right a historical wrong, on the other, the person in question has a right to privacy and, furthermore, is not legally capable of consent (and the question would become moot were they to die). Karen, still grieving the loss of her lover and colleague Phil, needs the distraction of work, but also can’t resist getting involved in a recent investigation when she discovers the dead man’s mother was also murdered years earlier. Karen Pirie, Police Scotland, cold case division, has suffered a tragic loss and is still trying to find an even keel. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Out of Bounds by Val McDermid for review.

I still prefer the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series by the author, but this one and the one that comes after (that I picked up straight after I finished this one) are really good and I now want to read the first book that I haven't yet read.

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