THE SKELETON ROAD by Val McDermid - outstanding novel reviewed by The Bookman on Radio New Zealand National this morning

THE SKELETON ROAD by Val McDermid

Little,Brown – NZ$37.99

Reviewed with Kathryn Ryan on Radio NZ National 15 September 2014

I read this 406 page novel in two long sittings last Saturday and I can tell you it was no hardship. I should confess at the outset that I am an enormous fan of Val McDermid.

She is a Scottish crime writer, although these days she lives in both Edinburgh and Manchester and is probably best known for a series of suspense novels starring her most famous creation, Dr. Tony Hill. In my view she is one of the great contemporary crime writers which is witnessed by the fact that her novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold almost twelve million copies.

She has three different series, Tony Hill, Kate Brannigan and Lindsay Gordon but this latest one is her eighth stand-alone novel and I put it up there with her very best writing to date.

That is saying something because she has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010

The Skeleton Road opens with the discovery by a demolition quantity surveyor of a skeleton hidden at the top of a crumbling gothic building in Edinburgh that is due for demolition.

Because there is a bullet hole in the forehead of the skeleton Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of the Historical Crimes Unit is sent to check out the situation. Short of immediate clues she gets forensics involved to aid with age and identification of the skeleton and so begins an investigation that takes them initially to Oxford and then far beyond. 

They eventually establish the victim is a male from Croatia who was 47 years old at the time he died eight years before, he had no apparent connections to the house in Edinburgh. But he was an important figure in the Balkan wars of the 1990's. He was a high-ranking officer in the Croatian Army, then he was with NATO intelligence in Bosnia and finally with the UN in Kosovo before he retired and moved to Oxford to live with his British girlfriend, an academic authority on Balkan affairs.

I can’t say too much more without spoiling it for future readers but I can say it is a very contemporary novel, set in 2014 in both Edinburgh and Oxford, (two locations the author knows well as she is a graduate of Oxford University). There are for example several references to the Scottish referendum on independence and to the Word Football Cup in Brazil.

Then there are a number of longish sequences that are flashbacks to the Balkan Wars most of which are set in Dubrovnik. I must say I had almost forgotten about the appalling atrocities committed during that time by both sides of the conflict. This book brought it all back.

There are some fascinatingly entwined relationships between the leading characters and there are numerous journeys between Scotland, England and Eastern Europe. 

Although occasionally harrowing I warmly recommend it to Val McDermid fans, to crime fiction lovers generally and indeed all who love a really well written and intriguing story.

Val McDermid (left) is going to be in Sydney later this month in conversation with leading Aussie crime writer Michael Robotham about psychology and crime as well as talking about The Skeleton Road which the author sees as an investigation into old conflicts, false identities and buried secrets. If it were not for prior commitments I’d be flying to Sydney on 29 September to hear these two great crime fiction writers in conversation.

Michael Robotham (right) presented the Ngaio Marsh Crime Fiction Award at the Christchurch Writers & Readers Festival in 2012.