Karen Pirie novels

More than twenty years after the 1984 national miners' strike in Scotland, Cold Case Review Team Inspector Karen Pirie stumbles across new evidence that links the cases of a missing strikebreaker and a kidnapping gone wrong.

"When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before. It's a cold case that should be straightforward. But it's as twisted as the DNA helix itself. Meanwhile, Karen is mired in grief and guilt after the death of her partner. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to another mystery that she has no business investigating, a mystery that has its...

"The UK's "Queen of Crime" Val McDermid returns to her propulsive series featuring cold case detective Karen Pirie, who finds herself investigating the shadowy world of forgery, where things are never what they seem. Still Life is intensely gripping from the first page and further proof that McDermid is writing at the top of her game. When a lobster fisherman on an early morning run pulls in his traps, he finds something he wasn't expecting to catch-a...