Val McDermid’s Silent Bones (Karen Pirie #8)

Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is prolific as well as extraordinarily accomplished: she writes some of the best crime fiction currently in print, and she continues to challenge herself with more complex plots and characterizations.

Karen Pirie, the Historical Cases investigator who is the protagonist of this series, is a good example. McDermid has portrayed both her work life, where she’s stubborn and stroppy, and her personal life, which has been pathos-filled, with extraordinary empathy. Karen lost her partner and then found happiness with a Syrian surgeon, a refugee in Scotland who subsequently settled in Canada. Their visits have been brief, but when the novel opens they’re anticipating being able to build a life together.

In Silent Bones, Karen is looking into two deaths, both of which appear to be accidental, as well as a third that is definitely homicide: a skeleton is found when a section of motorway slides off during torrential rain.

The first apparent accident victim, an ambitious hotelier, apparently slipped on steep exterior stairs and fell, breaking both his ankle and his neck.

The other was in a car that was driven off the road.

As her team’s investigation proceeds, odd parallels between the two men crop up, and Karen and her crew must delve into a world of privilege and power that makes accountability all but impossible.

And then there’s the murder. Investigative journalist Sam Nimmo was the prime suspect in the battering death of his pregnant wife, Rachel, more than a decade ago, and it now appears he was framed for the crime by the people who also murdered him. Given Sam’s tenacious inquiries into the highest echelons of Scottish political life during the Referendum on Scottish independence years earlier, the potential suspects include some of Scotland’s most noted (and notorious) figures.

This is, in part, a MeToo novel. A young woman was sexually assaulted more than a decade ago at a house party, the details of the crime revealed to only a small number of people, although a sufficient amount of gossip circulated that she has changed her name.

And the victim is not one of that select group who is aware of the details of the crime: her assailants drugged her, and she has little memory of the events of that night; only her body’s bruises and pain convey how much she was brutalized.

Karen’s sense of justice is sometimes thwarted in this novel. Despite her own and her team members’ best efforts, existing legal and political structures inhibit bringing some powerful people to account. While this is a potentially depressing thread in the novel, McDermid is offering a realistic and believable account of how apparent progress in prosecuting sexual crimes has frequently been stalled by competing interests.

This is a well-paced, engrossing police procedural. And McDermid’s Acknowledgements section notes that she spent much of the previous year or two in significant pain, before and after spinal surgery that forced her to cancel a number of professional engagements. That she could keep writing and editing through this ordeal is a small and welcome miracle.