Student Alex Gilbey and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the dying body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead - and the only suspects are the four young medical students stained with her blood.
Stunning new psychological thriller from Britain's most exciting crime writer, the award-winning Val McDermid...'Val McDermid is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic on the crime-writing road' - Independent Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow is smothering St Andrews. Student Alex Gilbey and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery. And the only suspects are the four young students stained with her blood. Twenty-five years later, Fife police mount a cold case review. Among the unsolved murders they're examining is that of Rosie Duff. But someone else has their own idea of how justice should be done. One of the original quartet dies in a suspicious house fire. Soon after, a second is killed in what looks like a burglary gone sour. But Alex fears the worst. Someone is taking revenge for Rosie Duff. He has to find out who it is before he becomes the next victim. And it might just save his life if he can uncover who really killed Rosie all those years ago.
Author info:
Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. She is now a full-time writer and lives in South Manchester.
Nielsen review:
'There is no one in contemporary crime fiction who has managed to combine the visceral and the humane as well as Val McDermid ... She's the best we've got' New York Times 'The plotting is impeccable, the atmosphere palpable, and I doubt that it will be surpassed this year' Graham Caveney, Sunday Express 'McDermid has become our leading pathologist of everyday evil, and she both thrills and scares in this tale of celebrity stalking with a difference ... The subtle orchestration of terror is masterful' Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian
Kirkus review:
New forensic breakthroughs reopen a 25-year-old cold case. In the meantime, most of the forensic evidence has disappeared from the Fife storage lockup, and two of the four principal suspects have moved to the States. Still, Assistant Chief Constable James Lawson, who was a young copper patrolling the snowbound streets that December night, seems determined to prove the young students who fell over the body of pretty barmaid Rosie Duff on their drunken way home really did rape and kill her. These days, Ziggy is a much-admired gay pediatrician in Seattle; Tom is a born-again Christian proselytizing in the South; Mondo is a snobbish literature professor in Glasgow; and Alex, married to Mondo's sister Lynn, manufactures greeting cards in Edinburgh. But Rosie's two brothers haven't forgotten or forgiven, and her illegitimate son Graham is skulking about with vengeance in mind. All of them are spurring on Lawson, who seems to be making no headway on the case. Then, suddenly, Ziggy dies in an arson fire, Mondo becomes an intruder's victim, Tom is waylaid while visiting Alex, and Alex's new baby is abducted at a petrol station. Mere coincidence, says Lawson, but a chip of paint will prove him wrong. McDermid, putting aside her fondness for serial killers (The Last Temptation, 2002, etc.), masterfully presents the 1978 portion of her story but stumbles so badly with melodramatic present-tense plot quirks that readers will be well ahead of Lawson in naming Rosie's killer. (Kirkus Reviews)
