Out of Bounds
WHEN you read a detective thriller by Val McDermid, you understand why her novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold over 11 million copies.
From the start she grabs you and does not let you go until you turn the last page, satisfied that morality has been served and justice done.
is her 30th novel and focuses on detective Karen Pirie of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit.
Twenty-odd years ago, hairdresser Tina McDonald, 24, went out on the town in Glasgow with a few of her mates. They started at a bar in Sauchiehall Street and a few rounds later went on to Bluebeard’s nightclub near George Square.
The girls danced much of the night away with various guys, regrouping around 2am. There was no sign of Tina, but they figured she’d paired up with someone and left.
This wasn’t typical of Tina, but it didn’t worry them.
The next morning Tina’s body was found stuffed behind a skip in an alley outside Bluebeard’s. She had been raped, beaten and strangled – and the attacker had left his DNA on her body.
But despite interviewing hundreds of people who had been out in the city that night, Strathclyde police got nowhere. Twenty years later, Dundee United score a rare victory and late that night four friends stagger out of a pub.
“Ah want to drive all night,” proclaims Ross Garvie, 17. When his friend Wee Grantie points out that none of them has a car, Ross mocks him for his lack of ambition and hot-wires a Land Rover in the parking lot.
Exhilaration, inability to drive and being a bunch of newts means it isn’t long before Ross rolls the Landy spectacularly, killing his three pals and leaving himself in a coma. “Survival of the unfittest,” as a policeman remarks sourly. Just another sad end to a drunken evening, except it turns out there is a familial DNA link between Ross and the man who left his DNA on Tina.
Karen Pirie and her partner, detective Jason Murray, a pleasant enough boy but a bit slow on the uptake, are put on the case. Can they find Ross’s dad? Well, they can – but it turns out that things are not as straightforward as the cold case team hoped.
Meanwhile a young man, Gabriel Abbott, is found dead along a river path, clutching a handgun. This is not Pirie’s case – there’s nothing historical about it – and besides, it looks like suicide. But Pirie is intrigued: it turns out that 22 years ago Abbott’s mother died in a small aircraft brought down by an incendiary bomb. Because the pilot was an MP for Northern Ireland, it was assumed some Irish splinter group was responsible, but no one was ever prosecuted. In Pirie’s experience, murder does not run in families.
Could the deaths of Abbott and his mother be related? But while the air crash can certainly be described as historical, Abbott’s death is not her case, and the investigating officer is very territorial. is a great read.