Val McDermid

1979. It is the winter of discontent, and reporter Allie Burns is hunting for the story that will make her name. There are few women in the newsroom and she needs an explosive scoop for the boys' club to take her seriously. Allie and fellow junior reporter Danny Sullivan aren't afraid to raise hackles as they expose the underbelly of respectable Scotland. But shining light into the darkness creates powerful enemies. When Allie comes up with a plan...

On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea. It is quickly discovered that the dead man was the prime suspect in a decade-old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace. DCI Karen Pirie was the last detective to review the file and is drawn into a sinister world of betrayal and dark secrets. But Karen is already grappling with another case, one with even more questions and fewer answers. A skeleton...

Number one bestseller Val McDermid returns with another gripping, unputdownable thriller.

Edinburgh, haunted by the ghosts of its many writers, is also the cold case beat of DCI Karen Pirie. So she shouldn't be surprised when an author's manuscript appears to be a blueprint for an actual crime. Karen can't ignore the plot's chilling similarities to the unsolved case of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there's a problem:...

Psychological profiler Tony Hill is trained to see patterns, to decode the mysteries of human behaviour, and when he comes across a series of suicides among women tormented by vicious online predators, he begins to wonder if there is more to these tragedies than meets the eye. Similar circumstances, different deaths. Could it be murder? But what kind of serial killer wants his crimes to stay hidden? Former DCI Carol Jordan has her own demons to confront,...

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...

The first novel in the Lindsay Gordon series. Freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon is strapped for cash. Why else would she agree to cover a fund-raising gala at a girls' public school? But when the star attraction is found garrotted with her own cello string minutes before she is due on stage, Lindsay finds herself investigating a vicious murder. Who would have wanted Lorna Smith Cooper dead? Who had the key to the locked room in which her body was...

Guilt and grief have driven a wedge between long time crime-fighting partners psychologist Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan. But just because they're not talking doesn't mean the killing stops. Someone is killing women. Women who bear a disturbing resemblance to Carol Jordan. And when the evidence begins to point in a disturbing direction, thinking the unthinkable seems the only possible answer. Cornered by events, Tony and Carol are forced to fight...

Tony Hill and Carol Jordan team up again to face a serial killer unlike any they have ever encountered.

The dead talk. To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can use a corpse, the scene of a crime or a single hair to unlock the secrets of the past and allow justice to be done. Bestselling crime author Val McDermid draws on interviews with top-level professionals to delve, in her own inimitable style, into the questions and mysteries that...