Review: Still Life (Inspector Karen Pirie #6)
Gaby Meares
I broke all my usual rules by reading book 6 in a series, without having read any of the previous books. Fortunately, it’s not made an iota of difference to my level of enjoyment. I’m ashamed to confess that although I have seen Val McDermid a number of times at book festivals (remember those?) I have never read any of her books. Shame on me!
Still Life is an unputdownable police procedural. McDermid doesn’t muck around with time lines or convoluting sidetracking. Instead she builds a solid plot, or in this case, two solid plots, carried by characters who are nuanced and relatable. Karen, Jason (The Mint) and Daisy are people you’d be happy to share a pint with, down at your local.
DCI Karen Pirie heads the Historic Cases Unit and is constantly fighting to keep her unit running. The powers that be see it as a waste of resources that could be more usefully applied to current cases. Karen views solving cold cases as a way of finding answers for those left behind to grieve. She also relishes the challenge;
‘A cold case was a story, constructed piece by piece. Sometimes the pieces arrived in the wrong order, so it made no sense at first. But some stories were like that. They began at the end or in the middle and you had to stay vigilant, making sure you didn’t miss the clue that would shape the fragments into a narrative. And at the end, if you found all the pieces, you had a coherent tale.’
Karen, Jason and Daisy have to race against time to wind up the paperwork for the two cases, because
‘the virus that had been a whisper on the wind when they’d been running around assorted jurisdictions had taken firm root in Scotland and they’d been warned that in the morning, lockdown was scheduled to begin. They’d be working from home, whatever that meant in practice.’This is the first novel I’ve read where Covid19 is referenced, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. As Karen says; ‘even in a pandemic, murder should never go unprosecuted.’