Ach, a stupid boy showing off to his pals, more than likely. They lifted a Land Rover Defender and somersaulted it over a roundabout on the Perth road in the wee small hours. All three passengers smashed to bits, dead on arrival at Ninewells.'

Often at the end of the day, she knew there was no point in stripping to the skin and sliding between cool sheets. She would only lie stiff as a corpse, thoughts of murder running in her head, frantic hamsters on a wheel. When I started to read it,I felt that sweet sensation,that undeniable tingle down my spine and knew,yet again,that I was onto a winner!! Kelly, Stuart (4 September 2016). "Book review: Out Of Bounds by Val McDermid". The Scotsman . Retrieved 25 October 2016. This had it all - great characters - sympathetic, realistically flawed - I adore the relationship between Karen and her loyal offsider Jason, as well as cameos from some of her other protagonists like River. I lived in Edinburgh for ten years so loved the nostalgia trip of being able to picture all the streets, buildings and monuments. There’s a subplot about Syrian refugees that beautifully showcases Karen’s humanity and resolute practicality, and plenty of interesting scientific/forensic details. Here the whodunnit is less important than that “how will she catch them” and no less satisfying. McDermid is an experienced and confident enough writer to not feel the need to link all the cases together by infuriating coincidence, and neither do we have to endure the perpetrator’s POV. There’s no gratuitous violence but this is certainly no cosy mystery. An easy five stars from me.The plotting is great, with enough complexity to keep the reader guessing but without ever straying far over the credibility line. Although there are two separate cases on the go, McDermid juggles them well, never letting one be forgotten at the expense of the other. And personally, I'm delighted to see her set a series in her native Scotland. She doesn't shine a light on the political zeitgeist in quite the way Rankin often does, but she creates a clear and authentic picture of contemporary Scotland, particularly with regards to policing and justice systems. The sense of place, not only Edinburgh, but much of Scotland, is very strong in this novel. I read novels set in various places hoping to get a feeling for the setting and the people who inhabit it. McDermid excels at this here. Close attention to the geography of Edinburgh, the streets that Pirie covers in her insomniac nightly walks, is one detail I appreciated. Police in Scotland, as in Ireland, and England, don't always work in the places where they were raised. As a result, Pirie is aware that this officer is from Dundee, as he talks in a distinct way. Another police officer's Glasgow accent gives him away. The narrator shifts accents, and though I don't actually know how accurate these accents are, it certainly adds to the texture of the narration, as does McDermid's attention to the diversity of Scottish talk, and the importance of geography. Meanwhile, in the small town of Kinross in Fife a man is found dead in a local park. As the victim was known for his occasional periods of depression and social dislocation, as well as a recurring obsession with conspiracy theories, the local police are inclined to dismiss the death as suicide. Becoming apprised of the death by chance, DCI Pirie is not convinced, especially when she learns that the dead man’s mother had herself been the victim of a sensational murder twenty years ago. As DCI Pirie keeps reminding us, murder doesn’t run in families … does it? On her 30th novel . . . none is more deserving of the queen-of-crime mantle than Val McDermid . . . I would like to see a great deal more of DCI Pirie.”— Irish Times Still Pirie is fierce and jumps into the case with no holds barred. There are unusual twists that complicate the investigation. She also stumbles into another cold case, a small airplane bombed years ago supposedly by the IRA and all four passengers were killed. Pirie's investigation negates the Irish connection and leads to another murder just committed.

I personally really enjoyed Out of Bounds. It is a gripping book that chilled me however when I begun to think about how deceptive people really can be – fiction or otherwise.First and foremost, a large thank you to NetGalley, Val McDermid, Grove Atlantic, and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing me with a copy of this book, which allows me to provide you with this review.

I marvelled at the volume of information divulged in each case,the myriad twists and turns and how the cases were resolved,in their own unique way,although not to everyone's satisfaction.

Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie walks the streets of Leith in the small hours. She cannot sleep as her lover and colleague, Phil Parhatka, was killed in the last outing in this series ( The Skeleton Road). [1] At night she encounters displaced Syrian refugees in alleyways and under bridges gathered together to try and be a community, as since coming to Scotland, they have nowhere to meet up. Indeed their characters were so well developed,that I felt like dropping by the police station for a can of Irn Bru and a doughnut! When a teenage drunk driver is found to share familial DNA with a rapist twenty years in the past DCI Karen Pirie from the Historic Cases Unit is called upon to hunt down the murderer and give the rape victim’s family some closure. While she and her young assistant DC Jason Murray hunt down leads in what turns out to be a less than clear cut investigation, Pirie is pulled into another case which involves a possible suicide of a young man with links to another cold case from the past. This is Val McDermid's thirtieth novel and the first one I have read. Out of Bounds is the fourth book in a series featuring DCI Karen Pirie but can easily be read as a standalone police procedural. I won’t begin to try and tell people how great the narrative, the setting and characterisations were. Anyone who has ever read any of the other 29 novels McDermid has written will know this is a given. The pacing matches the concept of a cold case unit completely, slightly less urgency in terms of finding the result as the evidence, as with many of the suspects, is considerably older than they used to be. However, when the pacing increased when the peril was the greatest, and from the outset the sense of a greater conspiracy always bubbled just under the surface of the story, drawing me, as the reader, most assuredly, to a very satisfying conclusion. A supposed suicide of Gabriel, a Kinross man, also leads to Karen unofficially opening a cold case on a 1994 aircraft crash. The aircraft contained 4 people, the pilot was an MP and one of the passengers was Gabriel's mother. It was always believed that an incendiary device had caused the aircraft to crash and that the IRA were responsible. As Karen digs deeper, she finds more and more and comes to believe that the terrorists were far from responsible. [3]

I started off wondering if I had the right book and it wasn't until I was a little way in did I realise what a brilliant way Val Mcdermid had dealt with the death of Karen Pirie's significant other. I have nothing but praise for Val mcDermid over this. Out of Bounds is a topnotch police procedural led by a Scottish cold case detective who uses her innate intelligence to resolve crimes. While the mysteries behind these crimes play a substantive role, DCI Karen Pirie is the star of this book. The thing I enjoy most about Val’s books is the strong characters and their intricate relationships, Karen, Carol, Kate, all of them feel like real people. And every time there is a new book out, I just have to have it! Especially with that cliffhanger ending of “The Skeleton Road”. I was so happy that I already had this one on my shelf; the wait would have killed it for me. Overall I’m mostly happy with how everything turned out; even if Karen didn’t get it all. That makes everything just so much more real. In The Press and Journal, Roddy Brooks noted the determination of the main character and said that McDermid was a writer at the height of her game. [4] When she and her colleague begin to delve beneath the surface,what they discover takes them on a diverging course that makes them privy to the fury and humiliation of fellow officers,the ire of their commanding officers,and the wilful determination of the person responsible for the deaths of innocent people.McDermid excels in putting the reader at the center of the action . . . A tightly paced mystery . . . My bones tell me we haven’t seen the last of Inspector Pirie – or at least I hope not. Out of Bounds is a 2016 crime drama novel by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. The novel is set during 2016 but because the main detective is in the Historic Case Unit (HCU) the crimes being investigated were actually committed in 1994 and 1996. When we first meet the irascible Detective Karen Pirie, she is a hot mess: Her boyfriend and fellow detective has been murdered (we never find out how), her boss is out to get her (we never learn why), she isn’t sleeping, and she is drinking like a fish. Pirie runs the historic cases unit of the Scotland police near single-handedly, her only assistant a bumbling young constable. Yet she apparently doesn’t have enough work of her own to do, because when the case that she is initially investigating stalls out, she finds time to meddle in a non-cold case belonging to another detective from a completely different unit. When a man with mental health problems was found on a park bench with a bullet in his head, the dead-weight detective in charge of the case wrote it off as a suicide. Pirie disagrees and, without notifying that detective or her superiors, launches her own unofficial investigation, even running off to London to interview witnesses in her spare time. (No wonder her boss doesn’t like her.) As the plot gradually unfolds, credulity is strained at every turn. The villain’s motive is thin, his actions bizarre. And with Detective Pirie operating so far outside the norm for a police detective, it ultimately becomes impossible to suspend disbelief. I am aware that Val McDermid has had a long and distinguished career as an author of mysteries and thrillers, but I must admit that this is the first of hers that I have read. This is an extremely good police procedural that builds suspense gradually and kept me wondering who the antagonist(s) might be. I grew to admire the MC, Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, a strong-willed, dedicated, cold-case detective who has experienced her share of personal tragedies. I found her situation and circumstances, as well as the behavior of the other characters, believable, so much so that I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that this novel was based on a true story. This is a police procedural led by a Scottish cold case detective who uses her innate intelligence to solve crimes.