Silent Bones by Val McDermid review: 'a murder that could have changed the future of Scotland'

Similarly, most of us look on the M73 merely as a way of getting from the M80 to the M74. Driving along its seven-mile length, we don’t pause to think when it was built and whether a body could be buried in the substrate beneath the tarmac. Once again, the reason is simple. We aren’t Val McDermid.

Yet those are the latest cases she calls on Karen Pirie and her small team at the Historic Crimes Unit to investigate in her latest novel. The first happened in 2020, just before the pandemic; the second just before the 2014 referendum. If you want a thriller that frames the most traumatic/ idealistic/liveliest/deadliest moments in the last couple of decades, McDermid has it covered.

It is easy to see why cold case units such as Pirie’s have such a strong appeal. Miscarriages of justice and police failures to investigate crimes have made us suspicious of the crime novel’s traditional reassuring conclusions. Cold case units are the backstops to that loss of faith: the bad guys will get caught in the end, they imply; it will just take a bit longer. From Unforgotten to Waking the Dead to Department Q, they fill our small screens as well as our bookshops - or, in Pirie’s case, both.

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That body in the motorway, uncovered after a landslide caused by torrential rain, turns out to be that of a journalist who was working on a story about a woman being attacked and possibly raped by a high-profile supporter at a fund-raising party for the Yes campaign. As Pirie realises straight away, the story “could have changed the future of Scotland”.

In both the journalist’s death and that of the man found dead at the bottom of the Scotsman Steps, the police account of what happened is clear enough. Clear, and wrong. In the latter case, the man was on his way to a New Town book group whose members call themselves the Justified Sinners. When their organiser is asked why he won’t help the police with their inquiries, he exclaims: “What? That old chestnut about having nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide? Nobody who has witnessed the activities of Police Scotland over the past couple of years and seen the wreckage they have made of people’s lives and reputations would give that a moment’s credit.”

Just in case we haven’t got the message, when Pirie asks her team if they know anyone involved in the independence campaign, her deputy jokes that she’s had a selfie with Nicola Sturgeon. “Away you go and interview her then,” says Pirie. “She’s used to Police Scotland officers rocking up to ask stupid questions.”

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Pirie, in other words, isn’t just uncovering new evidence, she is also overwriting wrong narratives that police laziness or ineptitude allowed to take hold in the first place - and which, we are repeatedly shown (though I can’t explain without spoilers), have wrecked lives. Maybe that’s her place in crime fiction, or maybe it’s just that she isn’t a magic Sherlock or (aren’t we all tiring of these?) a maverick fighting her own demons. Mercifully, she’s relatively ordinary but good at her job.

Although Pirie is well worth following, the main reason to do so is McDermid’s fiendishly elaborate plotting. Whether name-checking some of her crime-writing buddies in the Justified Sinners subplot or venting about villains (“After Covid, conspiracy theories had turned all sorts of businesses and individuals into targets. With some, like Michelle Mone, that response felt legitimate”) she clearly has had fun writing this. It’s fun to read too – right up to a final plot twist that not even the world’s finest clairvoyant could see coming.

Silent Bones, by Val McDermid, Sphere, £22

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