From internationally bestselling author Val McDermid comes a propulsive new Karen Pirie thriller that delves into a historic missing persons case, fake identities, and art forgery.

Val McDermid is the award-winning, international bestselling author of more than thirty novels and has been hailed as Britain’s Queen of Crime. In Still Life, McDermid returns to her propulsive series featuring DCI Karen Pirie, who finds herself investigating the shadowy world of forgery, where things are never what they seem.

When a lobster fisherman discovers a dead body in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, Karen is called into investigate. She quickly discovers that the case will require untangling a complicated web—including a historic disappearance, art forgery, and secret identities—that seems to orbit around a painting copyist who can mimic anyone from Holbein to Hockney. Meanwhile, a traffic crash leads to the discovery of a skeleton in a suburban garage. Needless to say, Karen has her plate full. Meanwhile, the man responsible for the death of the love of her life is being released from prison, reopening old wounds just as she was getting back on her feet.

Tightly plotted and intensely gripping, Still Life is Val McDermid at her best, and new and longtime readers alike will delight in the latest addition to this superior series.

Review:

Complex, intriguing, and sophisticated!

In this impressive sixth instalment in the Inspector Karen Pirie series, Still Life, McDermid has written a fast-paced, sinuous, police procedural that has DCI Pirie and her team from the Historic Cases Unit immersed in two investigations, one involving skeletal remains found inside a camper van parked in a residential garage, and the other concerning a newly deceased middle-aged male found floating in the water who seems to have an extremely mysterious, complicated past.

The prose is sharp and tight. The characters are impulsive, secretive, and greedy. And the plot, including all the subplots, seamlessly intertwine and unravel into a gripping tale full of deception, manipulation, misdirection, mayhem, violence, and murder.

Overall, Still Life is another engrossing, pacey, action-packed thriller by McDermid that once again has just the right amount of suspense, well-drawn characterization, and creative storyline to make it a satisfying, highly entertaining read for lovers of this genre.

This book is available now.

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