Silent Bones
A Karen Pirie Novel
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3.9 • 44 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Powerful, moving and wise – Val McDermid’s books are always enthralling.”—Harlan Coben
“A beautifully structured, witty and twisty novel.”—Ann Cleeves
The new installment in the “relentlessly engrossing series” (Wall Street Journal) finds Karen Pirie and her team investigating the murder of a journalist paved under a motorway—but was it his work or his private life that put him there?
Scotland, 2025. When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a motorway, it dislodges more than mud and asphalt – it reveals a skeleton, concealed when the road was built eleven years prior.
Sam Nimmo, an investigative journalist who’d been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, had become the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. Now he’s reappeared, buried under the motorway. It’s the perfect cold case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit. What was Nimmo investigating that was worth killing over? Or was it revenge for murdering his girlfriend? Meanwhile, an allegation of murder has surfaced over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager. It may have links to another accident on a remote Highland road. It’s a series of puzzles that tests Karen and her team to their limits. And possibly beyond . . .
A darkly propulsive thriller of secrets hidden at the core of a Scottish Highlands town, Silent Bones reaffirms Val McDermid as a crime writer of inimitable power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McDermid is at the top of her game in the masterful latest installment of her DCI Karen Pirie series (after Past Lying). When human remains are discovered in a collapsed section of Scotland's M73 highway, Karen calls on detective sergeants Daisy Mortimer and Jason "The Mint" Murray to investigate. Meanwhile, in a separate case, Daisy interviews Drew Jamieson, who's gathered evidence that his brother Tom's fatal fall on Edinburgh's Scotsman Steps several years earlier may have been murder, despite police insistence that it was an accident. Staff at the nearby Scott Monument Hotel recall a disagreement between Tom and the hotel's sommelier, Bob Watson, because Watson quit the pair's football club to join a mysterious book group called the Justified Sinners. When the M73 remains are identified as those of investigative journalist Sam Nimmo, who disappeared from the scene of his girlfriend's murder a decade ago, Pirie pinpoints a connection between Sam's death, Tom's death, and the Justified Sinners, and sends her team barreling after the shadowy organization. McDermid's procedural instincts are as sharp as ever, and she balances them with wrenching developments in Karen's personal life, including her fraught relationship with Syrian activist Rafiq Yasin. Readers will rest easy knowing they're in the hands of a seasoned storyteller.
