The Skeleton Road
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4.1 • 37 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An Edinburgh detective encounters skeletal remains that may be connected to the brutal Balkan Wars of the 1990s in this “tightly paced mystery” (Los Angeles Times).
In the center of historic Edinburgh, Scotland, builders are preparing to demolish a disused Victorian Gothic building. They are understandably surprised to find skeletal remains hidden in a high pinnacle that hasn’t been touched by maintenance for years. Who do the bones belong to, and how did they get there? Could the eccentric British pastime of free climbing the outside of buildings play a role? Enter cold case detective Karen Pirie, who gets to work trying to establish the corpse’s identity. And when it turns out the bones may be from as far away as former Yugoslavia, Karen will need to dig deeper than she ever imagined into the tragic history of the Balkans: to war crimes and their consequences, and ultimately to the notion of what justice is and who serves it.
“McDermid melds the political thriller with the police procedural for an intense novel.”—Associated Press
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The discovery of a man's skeleton atop an Edinburgh building slated for demolition kick-starts Diamond Dagger Award winner McDermid's hit-or-miss follow-up to 2008's A Darker Domain. Det. Chief Insp. Karen Pirie identifies the remains as those of Gen. Dimitar "Mitja" Petrovic, an intelligence expert with ties to the Croatian army, NATO, and the U.N. Karen learns that he had lived for years with Oxford University professor Maggie Blake, who met the general during her time as an academic in Dubrovnik during the Balkan conflict. Maggie, who hasn't seen or heard from Mitja in eight years, always assumed that he returned to Croatia. The answers lie in the past, particularly the bloody Serb-Croat conflict in the 1990s, so it's inevitable that Karen and Maggie end up traveling to Croatia. McDermid does a fine job recreating the brutal Balkan years, but the characters lack depth, leaving readers yearning for the richness of her long-running Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series.
Customer Reviews
Political History as Police Procedural
Though not so long ago, the Balkan wars of 1990s have been relegated to the half-remembered (and, to be frank, pre-9/11) past by many of us outside the region. The Skeleton Road takes the wars as the frame for this great police procedural with a quartet of strong female characters.