Internationally bestselling author Val McDermid is one of our finest crime writers, and her gripping, masterfully plotted novels have garnered millions of readers from around the globe. In Broken Ground, cold case detective Karen Pirie faces her hardest challenge yet. Six feet under in a Highland peat bog lies Alice Somerville's inheritance, buried by her grandfather at the end of World War II. But when Alice finally uncovers it, she finds an unwanted surprise—a body with a bullet hole between the eyes. Meanwhile, DCI Pirie is called in to unravel a case where nothing is quite as it seems. And as she gets closer to the truth, it becomes clear that not everyone shares her desire for justice. Or even the idea of what justice is. An engrossing, twisty thriller, Broken Ground reaffirms Val McDermid's place as one of the best crime writers of her generation.

Spend Christmas with this deadly duo of classic crime short stories, by number one Sunday Times bestseller Val McDermid In this collection of two short stories, the peace of a picture-perfect Christmas in the Cotswolds is shattered by an unexpected turn of events, and DI Maggie Staniforth takes centre stage in a deadly tale of hardship at Christmas. Containing all of the atmosphere and tension of Val McDermid's masterful crime novels, Christmas is Murder is the perfect short read to settle down with this festive season. Includes the first chapter of Val McDermid's latest Sunday Times bestselling novel, Broken Ground* - out now* * *Praise for Queen of Crime, Val McDermid: 'The queen of crime is still at the top of her game' Independent 'Beguiling . . . A compulsively readable tale' Irish Times 'No one can tell a story like she can' Daily Express This duo of short stories contains 'A Traditional Christmas' and 'A Wife in a Million'. **

The Number One bestselling crime series featuring Tony Hill, hero of TV’s Wire in the Blood, written by the award-winning Val McDermid. This is a psychological thriller – and serial killer – that will keep you up at night.For some, there is nothing so sweet, so thrilling, as the torment of others …A dead girl lies on a blood-soaked mattress, her limbs spread in a parody of ecstasy. The scene matches a series of murders which ended when irrefutable forensic evidence secured the conviction of one Derek Tyler. But Tyler's been locked up in a mental institution for two years, barely speaking a word – except to say that 'the Voice' told him to do it.Top criminal psychologist Dr Tony Hill is prepared to think the unthinkable – this is not a copycat murder but something much stranger. While DCI Carol Jordan and her team mount a desperate and dangerous undercover police operation to trap the murderer, Hill heads towards a terrifying face-off with one of the most perverse killers he has ever encountered…From Publishers WeeklyThe 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 Hill and Det. Chief Insp. Carol Jordan, joined by DI Don Merrick, elevated from the ranks of supporting players. Topping their docket are two serial killers: a child molester who murders and hides his young male victims and the Creeper, who tortures and slays prostitutes using the identical modus operandi of a killer firmly ensconced in a mental facility. McDermid's strength is the engaging and multidimensional characters he creates on both sides of the law. The book was a finalist for the CWA's 2004 Gold Dagger Award, but this audio abridgment is more interested in story than in character. There are several effective set pieces, notably an undercover sting that goes bad, resulting in the abduction and torture of a novice policewoman, and Merrick's life and death struggle with the child predator. At these points, Doyle's competent but undistinguished performance rises to the challenge. But by trimming away the novels' strongest element—its vibrant characters—the abridgment highlights the novel's weakest element: the less than credible sequences leading to the identity and capture of the Creeper. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review In the latest in the series starring forensic psychiatrist and criminal profiler Dr. Tony Hill (which has become the basis of a TV series on BBC America), Hill, finishing out a teaching appointment at St. Andrews, finds himself relieved to leave academia for a real case. The Bradfield Metropolitan Police once again seek his advice, this time regarding two missing children, a murdered seven-year-old kidnapped 15 months earlier, and a newly kidnapped eight-year-old. At the same time, a murder victim is discovered, killed in the same fashion as the victims of a man who has been in a mental institution for two years. McDermid is unusual in her ability to keep the suspense high while constructing social mysteries that are far-ranging in their implications--for example, she touches on the societal forces at work today (such as the lack of true neighborhoods) that make it easier for kids to be victimized. One of the most compelling features of this latest entry is the torment that returning Bradfield DCI Carol Jordan (brutally assaulted in the last mystery) feels as she and her team track down the current murderer while she struggles with the memory shards from the last case. McDermid brings to her mysteries an unusual capacity for compassion, both for victims and for the detectives whose lives are shattered tracking down the killers. Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Mapping the minds of murderers is what Dr. Tony Hill does better than anyone. So when a twisted killer starts targeting psychologists across Northern Europe, Hill is the obvious choice to track the executioner's mental and physical journey.Except that Tony, still bearing the scars of past cases, doesn't want to do this anymore.But the killer is about to strike uncomfortably close to home. The next victim is a friend and colleague. And Tony's former partner, Detective Carol Jordan, is directly in the murderer's path, working undercover in a world where human life means less than the smallest drug deal. She needs Tony's help as much as the beleaguered European police officials do.Now the danger is closing in. Confronting the worst of modern crime and struggling to unravel roots that lie deep in the tormented past of Nazi atrocities and Stasi abuses, Tony and Carol are forced to battle for survival against overwhelming odds. In this morass of...

In the new installment to her historical crime series that began with 1979, internationally bestselling author Val McDermid delivers a propulsive new thriller that finds journalist Allie Burns has become an editor, and as the Cold War and AIDS crisis deliver a nonstop tide of news, most of it bad, a story falls into her lap. And then there's a murder. Hailed as Britain's Queen of Crime, Val McDermid's award-winning, internationally bestselling novels have captivated readers for more than thirty years. In her Allie Burns series, she returns to the past—both ours and in some ways her own—with the story of a female journalist whose stories lead her into world of corruption, terror, and murder. It's 1989 and Allie Burns is back. Older and maybe wiser, 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...

Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find...He's handsome and talented, rich and famous—a notorious charmer with the power to seduce...and the will to destroy. No one can believe what he's capable of. No one can imagine what he's already done. And no one can fathom what he's about to do next. Until one of Hill's students is murdered—the first move in a sick and violent game for three players. Now, of all the killers Hill and Jordan have hunted, none has been so ruthless, so terrifyingly clever, and so brilliantly elusive as the killer who's hunting them...Val McDermid's Wire in the Blood is "A superb...

Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezlng day in December, another child goes missing: thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her town, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome which reverberates through the years. Decades later he finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when the book is poised for publication, Bennett unaccountably tries to pull the plug. He has new information which he refuses to divulge, new information that threatens the very foundations of his existence. Catherine is forced to re-investigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down. A Greek tragedy in modern England, A Place of Execution is a taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multi-layered narrative that turns expectations on their head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know.A Place of Execution is winner of the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a 2001 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.**

In this superb new addition to Val McDermid's masterful crime series, DCI Karen Pirie returns in a propulsive thriller of deceit and vengeance, set against the disquiet of a global pandemicBritain's reigning "Queen of Crime" (The Scotsman), Val McDermid is the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of over thirty novels. The long-awaited seventh novel in the acclaimed series that has captivated audiences for twenty years, both on the page and now in the Edgar Award–nominated ITV/BritBox show, Past Lying is a full tilt novel of ego, retribution, deceit, and just how far one will go to settle the score.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...

Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. Expect the unexpected . . .A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions – a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her – because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.

A Scottish police inspector deals with forgeries and false identities in a new murder mystery in the "superior series" (TheNew York Times). When a lobster fisherman discovers a dead body in Scotland's Firth of Forth, DCI Karen Pirie is called into investigate. She quickly discovers that the case will require untangling a complicated web—involving a long-ago disappearance, art forgery, and secret identities—that seems to surround a painter who can mimic anyone from Holbein to Hockney. Meanwhile, a traffic accident leads to the discovery of a skeleton in a suburban garage. Karen has a full plate, and it only gets more stressful as the man responsible for the death of the love of her life is scheduled for release from prison, reopening old wounds just as she was getting back on her feet. From a Diamond Dagger Award winner and multiple Edgar Award finalist, Still Life is a tightly plotted mystery featuring an investigator...

Hailed as Britain’s Queen of Crime, Val McDermid’s award-winning, internationally bestselling novels have captivated readers for more than thirty years. Now, in 1979, she returns to the past with the story of Allie Burns, an investigative journalist whose stories lead her into world a corruption, terror, and murder. The year started badly and only got worseâ€"blizzards, strikes, power cuts, and political unrest were the norm. For journalist Allie Burns, however, someone else’s bad news was the unmistakable sound of opportunity knocking, and the year is ripe with possibilities. But Allie is a woman in a man’s world. Desperate to get away from the “women’s stories” the Glasgow desk keeps assigning her, she strikes up an alliance with wannabe investigative journalist Danny Sullivan. From the start, their stories create enemies. First an international tax fraud, then a potential Scottish terrorist group aiming to...