Still Life: The heart-pounding number one bestseller from the Queen of Crime

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She is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In the book there are friends whose names are used for characters, there is a fabulous acknowledgement and so I had high hopes that it'd be great, and of course it was. bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have sold over eleven million copies. A current murder ends up intertwined with a ten year old cold case file involving missing persons and false identities. In this one, there is a hint of the pandemic to come and the book ends just as Scotland is about to go on lockdown for Covid.

I also liked some of the novel (to me) expressions, like braw day (fine day); the crack of sparrowfart (early morning); radged (angry); breenge in (rush in); and others. While Pirie and Mortimer work the Auld case, DC Jason Murray handles the skeleton case and chases down a lead on his own. She also attaches great importance to the archaic and bureaucratic echelons in the force in the sense that everyone below her are plods, and those above are there because of political reasons.Karen has only one minor skirmish with her boss ("the dog biscuit") and both the cold cases she's been assigned move forward smoothly.

The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there’s a problem: the author died before he finished it. In this impressive sixth instalment in the Inspector Karen Pirie series, Still Life, McDermid has written a fast-paced, sinuous, police procedural that has DCI Pirie and her team from the Historic Cases Unit immersed in two investigations, one involving skeletal remains found inside a camper van parked in a residential garage, and the other concerning a newly deceased middle-aged male found floating in the water who seems to have an extremely mysterious, complicated past.She knows how to strike that fine balance between the characters personal and professional lives, providing just the right amount of each. I think it's been a long time since I read a book so solidly set in the realities of conducting an investigation in Europe in the era of the European Union. Telling two distinct stories and maintaining equal interest in both is likewise a stiff challenge for an author, one that even the best may fail to meet; for example, Raymond Chandler in The Long Good-Bye. Tamsin then chivvies her colleagues to go the extra mile, which puts Pirie's cases on the fast track. Val comes from Kirkcaldy, Fife, and read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (where she is now an Honorary Fellow).

A skeleton has been discovered in an abandoned campervan and all clues point to a killer who never faced justice – a killer who is still out there. Due to the impending virus, the ending is dark, but the idea of Karen’s determination to survive left me feeling hopeful.McDermid was signing books, and a woman asked her to autograph a Top of the Pops annual which contained a picture of the disgraced late TV presenter Jimmy Savile. As a long-time fan of her work, it was with eager anticipation, therefore, that I settled down with her latest of over 30 books, Still Life.