Still Life
by Val McDermid
This novel is sixth in a series featuring Scottish detective Karen Perie—she’s now a Detective Chief Inspector in the Historic Cases unit in Edinburgh.
As the book opens, a lobster fisherman pulls a dead body out of the sea off the Scottish coast. Evidence suggests the man was murdered. He has a French passport and drivers license in his pocket, so ID is established—or is it? Daisy Mortimer, the young detective sergeant assigned to the case, discovers that both documents were issued on the exact same day, and there’s no earlier history of a man with that name.
Meanwhile, DCI Perie has been called to a peculiar case: a woman clearing out her deceased sister’s house has discovered a camper van parked in the garage—with a skeleton in it. Though it’s newly discovered, the skeleton has clearly been there for some time, so the case seems appropriate for Historic Cases.
Pirie also gets pulled into the other case, the one with the body pulled out of the sea, because of a previous involvement. There seems to be a connection to a ten-year-old scandal: a high-powered senior bureaucrat in the Scottish government disappeared and has never been found. Pirie reviewed the case a few years ago, so is asked to take charge of this new investigation, working with DS Mortimer and the Paris police. Can this be the missing civil servant? And if so, where’s he been all this time?
And solving two crimes is not the only problem facing DCI Perie. First of all, there’s her boss, Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markle; she’s a climber who wants the cases closed quickly so she can take credit—but will stick Perie with the blame unless she comes up with answers by the time Markle has to report to her own superiors. And second, there’s Hamish Mackenzie, the coffee shop entrepreneur Karen’s been seeing for the past six months: he’s kind and thoughtful and easy on the eye, but just a little too prone to decide what’s best for her.
The plot of this fast-paced novel winds through the French Foreign Legion, art forgery, imposters and identity theft, as well as political ambition and class conflict. McDermid’s deft touch with dialogue and complex characterization delivers a thoroughly satisfying read.
Val McDermid was born in 1955 in a small mining community on the east coast of Scotland. Her roots were working class, but her family raised her to believe she was as good as anyone, and she clearly was talented from an early age. As a teenager, she was fast-tracked in a high school program for gifted students, and at age 16 she was accepted to Oxford University to study English.
After university, she returned to Scotland and became a journalist, eventually becoming the northern bureau chief for a national newspaper. She started writing her first novel, Report for Murder, in the 1980s; it was finally published in 1987 but she didn’t give up her day job as a journalist until 1991 when she signed a two-book deal and took the leap to becoming a full-time novelist.
Now often referred to as the “Queen of Crime” or the “Queen of Scottish Noir,” McDermid has written more than thirty novels, with over 16 million copies sold worldwide. As well as several standalone novels, she’s written four main book series, with lead characters Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan, Karen Pirie, and Tony Hill / Carol Jordan. The latter series, which began with The Mermaids Singing in 1995, won the Gold Dagger Best Crime Novel of the Year from the the UK Crime Writers' Association. She has won numerous other awards and accolades. In addition to her crime writing, she has also written plays and several children’s books.
In early 2021 she announced that she’s started writing a new series with a new central character, “a quintet of novels set at 10 year intervals, so 1979, 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019.”
She lives in a suburb of Edinburgh with her wife Jo Sharp, a professor at St Andrews University. She has a grown son, Cameron, from a previous relationship.
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