Criminally good crime books: Silent Bones by Val McDermid, The Hawk is Dead by Peter James, Lucky Thing by Tom Baragwanath
By GEOFFREY WANSELL
Published: | Updated:
Silent Bones is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Lead cold-case detective, DCI Karen Pirie – known to millions in two TV series – returns in a gripping mystery that opens with the discovery of a skeletal body buried in a motorway embankment.
It turns out to be investigative journalist, Sam Nimmo, who disappeared 11 years ago after the murder of his pregnant fiancée.
The world believed he fled because he killed her, but Pirie and her Historic Cases Unit have other ideas.
Meanwhile, the accidental death of an Edinburgh hotel manager starts to look like murder, leading the team to a ‘book club’ with just 12 members who are among the most powerful in Scottish society.
Fine characters and a corkscrew twist at every turn.
The Hawk is Dead is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Queen Camilla is a fan of James’s Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and now finds herself the principal character in his 22nd Grace story, which begins with the derailment of the Royal Train in a tunnel in Sussex, when Camilla is on the way to visit hospices in the county.
Her Majesty survives, but Private Secretary Sir Peregrine Greaves is shot by a sniper after the pair have climbed to safety.
The obvious conclusion is that Camilla is the target, but Grace is less certain and so begins this wonderful example of James’s talents. Could there be a plot in Buckingham Palace, and if so, what? Packed with detail about the workings of the modern monarchy, the plot thunders along, underlining just how consummate a crime novelist James is.
Lucky Thing is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Police records clerk Lorraine Henry, who made her debut in the award-winning Paper Cage, returns in this dramatic story about a female student, who is found almost dead and dumped in the New Zealand bush.
Lorraine’s detectives don’t know what to think, and feel that it could just be an accident. But the indefatigable clerk does not agree and starts to investigate herself – even though she is a middle-aged woman who isn’t an accredited detective.
But Lorraine knows who has secrets to hide among the inhabitants of her little town, and she doesn’t mind that she is underestimated by her colleagues.
Wonderful, emotional storytelling with a fine protagonist – an Antipodean Miss Marple, but fiercer –makes this too good to miss.
Daily Mail
