Book 1

The Distant Echo

by Val McDermid

Published 1 May 2003

The award-winning Number One bestseller and Queen of crime fiction Val McDermid carves out a stunning psychological thriller. The past is behind them, but what’s still to come will tear them apart…

Some things just won’t let go.
The past, for instance.
That night in the cemetery.
The girl’s body in the snow.

On a freezing Fife morning four drunken students stumble upon the body of a woman in the snow. Rosie has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in an ancient Pictish cemetery. And the only suspects are the four young men now stained with her blood.

Twenty-five years later the police mount a ‘cold case’ review of Rosie’s unsolved murder and the four are still suspects. But when two of them die in suspicious circumstances, it seems that someone is pursuing their own brand of justice. For the remaining two there is only one way to avoid becoming the next victim – find out who really killed Rosie all those years ago…


Book 2

A Darker Domain

by Val McDermid

Published 1 September 2008

Val McDermid, creator of TV’s Wire in the Blood, mixes fact with fiction, dealing with one of the most important and symbolic moments in recent history.

Twenty-five years ago, the daughter of the richest man in Scotland and her baby son were kidnapped and held to ransom. But Catriona Grant ended up dead and little Adam's fate has remained a mystery ever since. When a new clue is discovered in a deserted Tuscan villa – along with grisly evidence of a recent murder – cold case expert DI Karen Pirie is assigned to follow the trail.

She's already working a case from the same year. During the Miners' Strike of 1984, pit worker Mick Prentice vanished. He was presumed to have broken ranks and fled south with other 'scabs'… but Karen finds that the reported events of that night don't add up. Where did he really go? And is there a link to the Grant mystery?

The truth is stranger – and far darker – than fiction.