By Scottish author Val McDermid, this was published in 2003. It's the first in a series featuring Detective Karen Pirie, but she doesn't actually play that big a role in this volume.

I listened to the audio-version, excellently narrated by Tom Cotcher. This is one of those stories that works brilliantly as an audio-book. There's lots of dialogue, and the voices of the characters really come to life. It weighs in at more than 14 hours of listening, but it's always easy to follow, and it never drags.

We have two critical time periods. The first is December 1978. We're in St Andrews, Scotland, and we watch as four young male students, returning home a little the worse for wear after a party, stumble upon the body of bar attendant Rosie Duff, who has been raped and stabbed. While Sigmund Malkiewicz, a medical student, tries in vain to administer first aid to the dying woman, Alex Gilbey runs off to find help.

The lads (the other two are David Kerr and Tom Mackie) find their lives irreversibly changed by this experience. For a start, given that no other possibilities come to light, they are seen as the primary suspects. There is not a shred of concrete evidence to convict them, but the presence of a couple of fuzzy points in their account of the evening in question means they find it hard to exonerate themselves completely.

Inevitably, then, the seeds of suspicion are sown within the group itself. How can you be SURE, after all, that your friend would not commit murder...?

And thirdly, there are the self-appointed vigilantes. Rosie Duff's criminal brothers are the most violent of these. They are convinced the students are guilty, and embark on a campaign of life-threatening harassment. Other members of the student community also seem all too willing to play the role of the lynch mob.


There's a bit of a connection with Glasgow, where these photos were taken in 2019...

Then we shift forward 25 years to the time of writing. A cold-case enquiry has been opened up, in the hope that the technological advances of the last quarter-century will help to make more of what little evidence came to light at the time.

Meanwhile, another human factor has emerged. We learn that Rosie Duff had a son -- born in secret, a long way from home, and immediately consigned to foster-parents -- and, having found out who his mother was, this young man, Graham MacFadyen, wants justice.

Things become ever more urgent, as the original four students start to die in mysterious circumstances. Malkiewicz perishes in a fire that was deliberately set; and Kerr is stabbed to death in his kitchen. The other two are also clearly in someone's spotlight.

I didn't identify the culprit until s/he was incontrovertibly barrelling towards us. But once you realize, it all makes perfect sense...

When we hear of technology helping to solve an old mystery, we immediately think of DNA. In this case, that's of no help, however, as some of the crucial evidence has gone astray. What we do have are significant advances in techniques for analysing paint...

McDermid is excellent at conjuring up a looming quality of fear and suspicion, and at showing how one crime ripples out and out in ever-increasing circles, affecting more and more people's lives. She is also adept in conjuring up a beautiful but often desolate Scotland. (She knew this part of the country intimately.)

Great work. I would read (or listen to) more.



Just a couple of interesting points to close with:

McDermid was for many years a newspaper reporter. One of the roles of crime fiction, she feels, is to tell the stories you can't tell in the media -- or at least can't tell at the time they're happening.

On the unique pedigree of Scottish crime fiction, she also has interesting things to say (quoted here from a 2008 article):

"It’s clear from the differences between us and our English counterparts that our roots are in very different soils. For English crime writers, the Golden Age of Christie, Sayers and Allingham casts a long shadow. It’s clearly discernable in the work of writers such as Reginald Hill, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Colin Dexter […] The line of descent for Scottish writers is quite different. The seed was sown with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a disturbing and compelling novel whose complex structure plays games with the reader, presenting us with one of the earliest examples of the unreliable narrative […] The next stepping stone is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde […] Sherlock Holmes, brainchild of Arthur Conan Doyle, actually fits the template of Scottish crime fiction as neatly as any of us. Evocative settings, a deeply dysfunctional detective, a dark heart to his investigations and, of course, the knowledge that there were damn few like him."

Ten years later, she's not only introducing us to the seminal influence of William McIlvanney ("for the first time" -- we're talking the 1970s -- "a writer of crime fiction was giving the world a different kind of Scotland"), but is also pointing us forward to a quartet of writers whose "books are where you should turn if you want to understand what Scotland is and how the last 20 years have brought us here" (they're Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, Louise Welsh, and Stuart MacBride), and throwing in for good measure a few more new writers who are carrying the torch even further.

LOTS more to read, then...