Out of Bounds

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I'm getting addicted to Karen Pirie, a focused, deep thinking detective who refuses to be bullied or indeed intimidated by senior (male) officers; who fosters and grows a network of women friends in labs, courts, tech etc.; a woman who mentors and strongly supports her loyal team of one, working class Jason; and this is where you know it's fiction, a detective who can't stand Trump or racists, and likes, and goes out of her way to support immigrant communities! Oh, and this was a great dual-case with some really interesting Scotland set police procedural. So I've now read two books in this series, and they both get 8 out of 12, Four Stars from me.

Has she taken on too much? Will she ever find the answers she wants and needs? Can Karen finally admit that she is desperately lonely and doesn’t know how to deal with the pain? Is Gabriel's death a straight forward suicide as it appears,or is there indeed a more sinister explanation for his death? Ruth Lawson (13 December 2012). "Ink thrown at author Val McDermid during Sunderland book signing". Journal Live. Archived from the original on 8 April 2013 . Retrieved 26 December 2012.Karen is very good at what she does. She never shies away from a difficult question or a seemingly impossible case. Inspector Karen Pirie is a well written character that gives lots of scope to the author to develop further. A very strong fiery intelligent woman who I would hate to be on the wrong side of and her boss knows exactly what I mean. The latest case belonged to Inspector Detective Noble. An apparent suicide of one of the sons whose mother was killed on board that ill fated plane. Karen's idea of a professional detective did not include Noble. Although officially this wasn't Karen's case she decided to do her own bit of investigation. This may not sit well with Chief Constable Simon Lees but that never stopped Karen when she had her mind set on finding answers that others had overlooked.

McDermid balances the intense character studies in Out of Bounds with an inside view of the Scottish legal system and again shows her acuity in producing intelligent thrillers.”— Associated Press Indeed their characters were so well developed,that I felt like dropping by the police station for a can of Irn Bru and a doughnut!

Congratulations to St Hilda's Alumnae Team on their Christmas University Challenge Victory". St Hilda's College, Oxford. 2 January 2017 . Retrieved 22 March 2017. While not,strictly speaking,her responsibility,for some inexplicable reason, she cannot free herself from the reins of this particular case. Meanwhile Karen finds herself irresistibly drawn to another case, one that she has no business investigating. And as she pieces together decades-old evidence, Karen discovers the most dangerous kinds of secrets. Secrets that someone is willing to kill for . . . In 2010, she was living between Northumberland and Manchester with publisher Kelly Smith, [33] with whom she had entered into a civil partnership in 2006. [2] What superlatives are there left to describe the phenomenon that is the multi award-winning McDermid? . . . Told with McDermid’s legendary verve and eye for detail, it grabs the reader by the throat and never lets go.”— Daily Mail (UK)

As the book opens, we find DCI Karen Pirie of the Historical Cases Unit still reeling from the recent loss of her partner. By day she buries herself in cold cases & spends her nights walking the streets of Edinburgh. Val McDermid is simply one of the best crime writers around. I have loved every book she's written. She has a number of series. Out of Bounds is the fourth novel featuring Inspector Karen Pirie. But you could absolutely read this as a stand alone. In alternate chapters we meet Gabriel Abbott, a young man with mental health issues. He suffers from periodic episodes of paranoia & has always been a solitary guy. When he was a child his mother was killed in a plane crash that was unofficially blamed on the IRA. Now he lives alone in Kinross & carefully follows a daily routine until the morning he’s found dead on a park bench. First and foremost, a large thank you to NetGalley, Val McDermid, Grove Atlantic, and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing me with a copy of this book, which allows me to provide you with this review. Karen as a character, well, you can’t help but dig in deep right alongside her – her way of dealing with personal tragedy, her way of rampaging through the white noise towards the truth of the matter and her ever growing relationships with those around her just give a hugely gripping anchor to the wider narrative, where in the mystery elements Val McDermid gives your brain a work out.The voice at the other end had the unmistakable vowels of Dundee. 'Aye, this is Sergeant Torrance from Tayside. Traffic Division.' He stopped abruptly, as if he'd given her enough information to be going on with. When I started to read it,I felt that sweet sensation,that undeniable tingle down my spine and knew,yet again,that I was onto a winner!! The DNA taken from a teenager involved in a fatal accident appears to match up with a cold case Karen has worked on and never forgotten. It matches the DNA evidence found under the nails of a murdered woman more than 20 years ago. Now Karen has to find a familial DNA match since that teenager wasn't alive at the time of the murder.