Val McDermid (2009) A Darker Domain.

This story has two intertwining narratives and reads like a screenplay. It’s 392 pages and it can be read in one go, or two—as I did—it goes down smooth as Guinness. I only spotted one cliché, ‘it was like herding cats’ but that was 200 odd pages in and is forgivable because it was qualified by another image. McDermid was a journalist that lived in Fife. She has a visceral understanding of the what the miner’s strike of 1984/5 did to that community and she brings it to bear here in Detective Inspector Karen Pirie’s investigation of Mick Prentice a miner locked out of his pit who went missing one night, twenty- five years before, and with four others was assumed to have taken the government’s money and become a scab in Yorkshire. The other narrative involves another missing person—Adam Grant. Catronia Grant his mother was murdered by an Anarchist group around the same time that Mick Prentice went missing. There seems to be no connection between the cases. There’s a stopwatch in play as Mick Prentice’s grandson needs a genetic match for an operation or he’ll die, but Catriona Grant’s father, Sir Broderick Grant, has a new lead in the murder case. He  wants his grandson found and he wants DI Pirie to do the finding. Being the richest man in Scotland means he gets what he wants. She is assigned to the case and cocks her snoop at such expectations and clandestinely continues with the investigation into Prentice’s whereabouts. She is aided in this subterfuge by Detective Sergeant Phil Parkhata. Oh dear there’s a play on we’re just good mates routine until they’re a bit more than that, but it’s okay because the investigation comes before coming and they quickly establish Prentice was no scab. Unpicking the final threads was not made simple, but I did guess. Tying up the knots, however, was expertly done. I’ve got another couple of McDermid’s novels and I will be reading them. She’s wonderfully adept at weaving one story into another and it’s very difficult to spot the joins.