Val McDermid’s Scottish cold case detective is beloved of millions of readers worldwide, and has been brought to life on TV screens by Lauren Lyle in two seasons of Karen Pirie (ITV in the UK; Britbox in the USA).
Whether you’re discovering Karen and her Historic Cases Unit for the first time or ensuring you haven’t missed the latest in the series, here are the Karen Pirie books in order:
Twenty-five years after a young woman’s body is found stabbed in a Fife cemetery, the cold case is re-opened – only for two of the four original suspects to die under suspicious circumstances.
The kidnap of Catriona Grant and her baby son dominated headlines in Scotland decades ago – now, evidence of a recent murder and a new clue in a deserted Tuscan villa lead to Karen Pirie taking on the case.
A skeleton is discovered at the top of a crumbling Edinburgh building and Karen Pirie is tasked with identifying the bones. The case will take her to the Balkans and the mystery surrounding a general who vanished eight years before.
When a teenage joyrider ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test could crack open a twenty-year-old murder enquiry. Karen Pirie may be an expert at solving the unsolvable, but the truth is as twisted as the DNA helix itself.
A body is discovered in the remote Highlands, unearthed with a long-buried inheritance. The victim seems to belong to the distant past – until new evidence suggests otherwise, and Karen Pirie is called in to unravel the case.
On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea – a prime suspect in a decade-old investigation into the disappearance of a prominent civil servant. Karen Pirie is drawn into the mystery, despite already grappling with the case of a skeleton found in an abandoned campervan.
A manuscript appears to be the blueprint to a real-life crime, that of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript might be the key, but there’s a problem: the author died before he finished it.
When torrential rain causes a landslide on a motorway in Scotland, it reveals a body hidden in the tarmac over a decade before. The journalist was the prime suspect in his fiancée’s murder and now Karen Pirie must find out who buried him, and why.
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