The Queen of Crime Val McDermid is at the top of her game in her most gripping and fiendishly clever case yet!

In Past Lying, the superb new addition to McDermid’s masterful crime series, DCI Karen Pirie returns in a propulsive thriller of deceit and vengeance, set against the disquiet of a global pandemic.

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot – the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed – but a mere pandemic doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday.

When a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. At the center of it, a novel: two crime novelists facing off over a chessboard.

But it quickly emerges that their real-life competition is drawing blood. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, and as Karen and her team attempt to disentangle fact from fiction, it becomes clear that their investigation is more complicated than they ever imagined.

A tense, atmospheric page-turner, Past Lying reaffirms McDermid as one of the most talented crime writers of her generation.

Past Lying is a full tilt novel of ego, retribution, deceit, and just how far one will go to settle the score.

‘I hadn’t intended to return to Karen Pirie when I did,’ McDermid says. ‘Sometimes you can’t escape your fate.

‘And my fate was I woke up one morning with a great idea for a story in my head, and inevitably it was a Karen Pirie story because it was about a cold case.

‘I tried to ignore it, I tried to get on with what I was supposed to be doing, but it just kept banging at the doors of my head, it wouldn’t go away. Sometimes this happens, you get an idea and it won’t leave you alone, and the only way to get it gone is to write it out.’

Watch a video of the author introducing the book:

Categories Fiction International

Tags Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases Past Lying Val McDermid Videos