An engrossing mystery-thriller from the Queen
Past Lying is another engrossing instalment in Val McDermid's series featuring Edinburgh-based Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie. It's April 2020 and Scotland has been in lockdown for three weeks, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. DCI Karen Pirie is in a domestic "bubble" with her HSU colleague, DS Daisy Mortimer in her partner Hamish's upmarket Edinburgh apartment. DC Jason "the Mint" Murray is in lockdown in the flat he shares with his fiancée. The team is called in to investigate a possible link between some papers recently donated to the Library of Scotland and a missing person case that is barely historical. A partial manuscript found amongst the papers of recently deceased crime novelist Jake Stein, contains details which are eerily similar to those surrounding the real-life unsolved disappearance of Edinburgh student Lara Hardie a year previously. Other details within the story seem to echo events in Stein’s personal and professional life over the period preceding Lara’s disappearance. Is this simply a case of an author drawing upon real life events interwoven with thinly veiled autobiographical details to create an imaginative story? Or could it be a devilishly clever plot designed to incriminate an innocent party in a real-life crime? Val McDermid cleverly leverages the circumstances of the Covid-19 lockdowns, with which all readers will be personally familiar to some extent, as a means to further develop her series characters while they're in extremis, and also to add a layer of complexity to the police investigation plotline itself. Past Lying brought to my mind Josephine Tey's 1951 masterpiece The Daughter of Time, and Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mystery The Wench is Dead, itself an acknowledged homage to Tey's work, both of which employed a mechanism for the detective protagonist to solve a crime while physically restricted from undertaking the "usual" investigative process. Past Lying is another high quality police mystery, with a twisty plot and convincing, well-developed characters, both those that have featured throughout the series and those who appear only in this story. McDermid's use of misdirection and intrigue are up to her usual superlative standard, and she draws upon her own decades of experience in the crime-writing community in building the background to the mystery. While the Edinburgh setting is necessarily narrowed in its depiction by the characters' enforced isolation, there remains a distinct Scottish flavour throughout, incorporated through the use of vernacular language, subtle cultural references and the characters' occasional opportunities to leave the confines of lockdown while carrying out essential face-to-face interviews, viewing crime scenes and gathering evidence. I'd enthusiastically recommend Past Lying to any reader who's enjoyed previous series instalments over the past 20 years, and to those new to either D.I. Karen Pirie or Val McDermid's substantial body of much-lauded work. My thanks to the author, Queen of Crime Val McDermid, publisher Grove Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Press, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this engrossing title.