When I spotted this,the latest offering from Val McDermid,an author that I greatly admire,I cast all other books aside and headed to the till,hugging this as if it were a treasured possession!!!

A decent plot that is not straight forward but excellently told and there are the usual twists and turns that make the difference between average thrillers and very good ones. Either way, on top of the two cases she is now chasing she has also managed to get involved with a group of immigrants desperate to find a place they can call home. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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McDermid balances the intense character studies in Out of Bounds with an inside view of the Scottish legal system and again shows her acuity in producing intelligent thrillers.”— Associated Press This is a police procedural led by a Scottish cold case detective who uses her innate intelligence to solve crimes. Internationally bestselling author Val McDermid is one of our finest crime writers, whose gripping, impeccably plotted novels have garnered millions of readers worldwide. In her latest, Out of Bounds, she delivers a riveting cold case novel featuring detective Karen Pirie. Inspector Karen Pirie is a well written character that gives lots of scope to the author to develop further. A very strong fiery intelligent woman who I would hate to be on the wrong side of and her boss knows exactly what I mean. Raith Rovers ladies' first match since breakaway". BBC News. 6 February 2022 . Retrieved 28 June 2022.

Bringing together grief, terrorism, murder, justice and forensics, the plot takes off when a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma and a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years ago. The answer to the cold case is “as twisted as the DNA helix itself”. A mystery rooted in a terrorist bombing two decades ago is also simultaneously investigated.

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McDermid has been writing as a full time author since the success of her initial novels and she spends equal amounts of time in her homes in Edinburgh and Cheshire. She hails from the Kirkcaldy town of Fife in Scotland and completed her college studies from the St. Hilda’s College in Oxford. While not,strictly speaking,her responsibility,for some inexplicable reason, she cannot free herself from the reins of this particular case. The Sinker - Generally I prefer to begin at the beginning of a series and probably would have put Out of Bounds off if I had realized this was number four for Karen Pirie. Oh, I don’t think I missed that much but felt like the third wheel while out with two friends who had known each other for years> Of course, we three know each other yet I’m not part of their shared memories. It can feel a bit awkward. Has she taken on too much? Will she ever find the answers she wants and needs? Can Karen finally admit that she is desperately lonely and doesn’t know how to deal with the pain?

Scottish crime writer Val McDermid’s 30th novel, is a suspenseful thriller called Out of Bounds, with Little, Brown – AVAILABLE NOW! Aye. One of the officers attending, it was his first fatal RTA. I doubt he'll get much sleep for a wee while. Anyway, the thing is, the driver's still alive. He's in a coma, like, but he's still hanging in there.' A fatal car crash leads to information about a cold murder case in the fourth DCI Karen Pirie mystery.

In alternate chapters we meet Gabriel Abbott, a young man with mental health issues. He suffers from periodic episodes of paranoia & has always been a solitary guy. When he was a child his mother was killed in a plane crash that was unofficially blamed on the IRA. Now he lives alone in Kinross & carefully follows a daily routine until the morning he’s found dead on a park bench. On her 30th novel . . . none is more deserving of the queen-of-crime mantle than Val McDermid . . . I would like to see a great deal more of DCI Pirie.”— Irish Times