Nadat ik wat minder enthousiast was over het vorige deel van de Jordan/Hill reeks, ben ik nu wel weer enthousiast. Goed verhaal, actueel ook omdat de slachtoffers via het internet (social media) worden gevonden en ook de persoonlijke verhalen zijn weer wat uitgediept. Ik ben meer te weten gekomen...
This is probably my favorite of the series, though I had to skip books 4 & 5, as my library lacks them. I was worried I'd have a hard time catching up, but having read the first three, I found that my knowledge of Carol, Tony and their relationship was enough to get me deeply engaged in this book...
My favorite Val McDermid novels are the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, but I enjoyed this one almost as much. I did find the flashbacks to be a bit confusing at times, and I kept mixing up the journalist's and the detective's investigations, but overall I was able to keep the story sorted out. I ...
It's interesting that some authors, like Michael Connelly, can write an amazing series of thrillers (the Harry Bosch's), while his other books in the same genre are pretty mundane, leaning toward bad. I've read a lot of Val McDermid, and she fits the same mold. This is definitely not one of her ...
Phew! finished. This book is set against the backdrop of the 1980's miners strike in Scotland and all the hardship it entailed. Murder and abduction are investigated as a cold case from those days and there are many unanswered questions. Val McDermid pulled it out of the hat again. Her plot is a ...
Considering it's been a while since I last read anything by Val McDermid I tend to forget what a truly great storyteller she is. The stand alone thrillers of her's that I've read before have varied from being a great read to an outstanding mnd blowing experience. What gets me is for a seasoned th...
Quite a decent mystery read, with the improbable twist that five of the main characters are Lesbians. This is mainly to illustrate that, just like all people Lesbians run the gamut from good to bad and struggle against all of the same relationship problems, work place dilemmas. and other moral q...
Can we just say *** PLACEHOLDER *** to all her books now? Um. Quick recollection: apt, echoing title on many levels. Multi-layered plot set in Europe, mostly Berlin. A serial killer whose own suffering might just have been a bit worse than the one he later inflicted. A modern high-flyer criminal ...
3.5/5 starsOn a cold snowy morning in St Andrews, Scotland in 1978, four drunk university boys returning home from a party, stumbled on a young barmaid fatally stabbed in the local cemetery. She died before help could arrive and the witnesses themselves became the prime suspects. Lack of evidence...
Second in this series about Manchester-based PI Kate Brannigan, this has her investigating 3 separate cases: one fizzles out as someone else solves it for her, while the other two - missing conservatories, and a friends lost property deposit - which both involve highly confusing mortgage scams - ...
This is the first of the Lindsay Gordon series that I've read, and I found it very different to the Tony Hill series, which I've really enjoyed. The central character is a journalist who has moved back to Glasgow from the USA because of her girlfriends career. At a loose end for work, she meets a...
This was the second in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series. Tony Hill is teaching the art of psychological "profiling" to a small group of young police officers, who show varying degrees of interest and acceptance. One, however, a young live-wire called Shaz Bowman, believes she has identified the ...
Third in the Kate Brannigan series, and more interesting than the last one, this has her investigating a drugs ring when her boyfriend Richard is arrested for driving a car with 2kg of crack in the boot. She drags in some of her friends that we've met in previous books to help when Richard's son ...
The Grave Tattoo, by Val McDermid B-plus.Jane Gresham is a Wordsworth scholar. There has been a rumor that she has heard since childhood that Fletcher Christian, of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame, made his way back to England, and that Wordsworth aided him in staying hidden and not arrested for the...
I have given this 4 stars, and must ask myself why, rather than 5 such as I gave to The Wire In The Blood and The Last Temptation.This is book 4 of a series that currently stands at 9 books. The first was published in 1995, the 9th just a few weeks ago in 2015. She's not churning them out putting...
I enjoyed this just as much as the first of the series, Report for Murder. It's a fun, easy read, again featuring Lindsay Gordon, self-proclaimed cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist. It has the same sharp wit and sarcasm as previously, and despite its Cold War era datedness, the plot is...
A Place Of Execution by Val McDermidMy dad (who reads two, maybe three books a week) told me that this was the best mystery he’d read in a long time. With an endorsement like that, who was I to argue? He tossed the book my wa...
I had never heard of Val McDermid before reading one of the Stieg Larsson books, and a scene where Mikael Blomqvist sits down and cracks one open. I took that as an endorsement. So this is the first of her I've read, and it has many flaws. The story itself isn't terrible, though quite farfetch...
This turned out to be a sort of stealth reread, since before I got to the second chapter I had a sudden vision of exactly how it ended, without any particular memory of what happened in between. Not so very much, as it turned out--the only mystery-solving takes place in a single and complete fla...
I think I've read ONE (or maybe two) or Val McDermid's early mysteries featuring Lindsey Gordon, a Brit lefty lesbian journalist in the 1980s (I could almost use the 'historical mysteries' tag now). Not this one, though, and not the next one I am about to review. It's interesting to me how this...
The last of her enjoyable Kate Brannigan series, and for some reason I had only this one in my shelf, though I had read them all last century, at least in translation. Kate is/was my favourite of her female characters. I had only read one of McDermid's first series (Lindsay), and it seemed dry, d...
I love Lindsay's character like whoa, but she's even better when she has a partner in inquiry. Beyond being just a sounding board, though, Sophie really grew on me in this book. Much more than Cordelia did in the previous books. Cordelia played more of the dense follower (with rather a tone of re...
While trying to find a new business partner, Kate tackles three cases: a fly-posting scam, a burial scam, and a murder case involving a murdered fertility specialist. This last was particularly interesting to me since my own Seminal Murder also features such a scientist. McDermid's scientist, how...