Scotland, 2025. When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a  motorway, it dislodges more than mud and asphalt – it reveals a skeleton, concealed when the road was built eleven years prior. 

Sam Nimmo, an investigative journalist who’d been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, had become the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. Now he’s reappeared, buried under the motorway. It’s the perfect cold case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit. What was Nimmo investigating that was worth killing over? Or was it revenge for murdering his girlfriend? Meanwhile, an allegation of murder has surfaced over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager. It may have links to another accident on a remote Highland road. It’s a series of puzzles that tests Karen and her team to their limits. And possibly beyond . . .

A darkly propulsive thriller of secrets hidden at the core of a Scottish Highlands town, Silent Bones reaffirms Val McDermid as a crime writer of inimitable power.

Review:

Gripping, gritty, and entertaining!⁣

In her latest novel, 𝐒ilent Bones, McDermid takes us back to Edinburgh, where DCI Pirie and her team in the Historic Cases Unit are investigating the homicide of an investigative reporter who vanished eleven years earlier after being accused of murdering his girlfriend, and delving into a potential scandal involving several politically powerful individuals.⁣

The prose is tight and intense. The characters are driven, intuitive, and tenacious, and the plot unfolds as a complex web of deception, abuse, deprivation, manipulation, control, power, mayhem, violence, and murder.⁣

Overall, 𝐒ilent Bones is a captivating, intricate, and menacing thriller that delivers everything I’ve come to expect from McDermid’s police procedurals, including strong pacing, meticulous deduction, and plenty of suspense.⁣

This book is available now.

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