Staff Picks Blog

I am a Val McDermid fan.  She writes a couple of series featuring characters Tony Hill, Kate Brannigan and Lindsay Gordon.  A Darker Domain is a stand alone title featuring Detective Inspector Karen Pirie of the Fife, Scotland Cold Case Squad.  Karen is working simultaneously on the long delayed (over twenty years!) report of a missing father and a kidnapping gone tragic.  Mick Prentice disappeared during a 1984 miners’ strike and was thought to have gone ‘scabbing’, but his daughter is now in need of bone-marrow transplant for her very ill child and is trying to find him… only it doesn’t look like he ever showed up where people thought he had gone.  Simultaneously a journalist vacationing with friends in Italy stumbles on new evidence in a kidnapping case that resulted in the death of a mother and the disappearance of a child.  She sees an opportunity to write a blockbuster and pursues an investigation at the request of the wealthy father/grandfather.  The chapters jump back and forth between the two cases and between the past and the present.   The history of the miners’ strike and story of their community is very interesting.  If you like British mysteries be sure to try this one.