Product Description

Powerful and atmospheric psychological thriller from the multi-award-winning Val McDermid: 'McDermid's capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing' The Times SOME THINGS JUST WON'T LET YOU GO The past, for instance. That night in the cemetery. The girl's body in the snow, her blood scarlet against the white ground! Four a.m. on a freezing Fife morning and four drunken students stumble upon the body of a woman lying 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 one of them dies in a suspicious house fire and another in a burglary gone bad, 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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38922 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Val McDermid's The Distant Echo is, even more so than with her previous work, a masterpiece of trickery and misdirection. In 1978, four male students find the body of Rosie Duff half-buried in the snow and their lives are variously damaged by the suspicion that falls on them when the murder is never solved; a quarter of a century later, the case is reopened and suddenly the quartet start to be killed one after the other.

This is an effective thriller because it is so intelligent about the ways in which time changes things--secrets that seemed important become trivial and investigative techniques become ever more accurate. It is also intelligent about the ways in which things do not change--the friendships of the four men persist even when one becomes a fundamentalist preacher and another a post-modern literary theorist. Unusually for McDermid, this is a very Scots book as well--the investigating officers Maclennan and Lawson are very much men of a particular time and place. McDermid has a real sense of how to make forensic details count in a murder story--she also, more importantly, has a heart--this is a novel that makes us care passionately about victims and suspects alike. --Roz Kaveney

Review
Praise for The Distant Echo: A powerful story of murder and revenge! an exciting page-turner' Sunday Telegraph 'She has created some of the most appealing figures in current crime fiction.Val McDermid has used the crime genre to write a novel that, above everything else, celebrates life and loyalty' TLS 'A real page-turner and another McDermid triumph' Observer 'McDermid's plot is a classic, and she pulls out all the stops to achieve a sense of mounting anguish, as her hero juggles multiple red herrings, mixed loyalties, differing police agendas and complicated family ties. Impeccable' Guardian 'Reminiscent of one of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine thrillers -- a few more sly, old-fashioned whodunits like this and she'll join the sturdy ranks of the queens of crime, on course to become Dame Val or Baroness McDermid' Sunday Times The real mistress of pychological gripping thrillers' Jenni Murray, Daily Express 'McDermid's capacity to enter the warped mind of a deviant criminal is shiveringly convincing' Marcel Berlins, The Times Praise for Killing the Shadows: 'There is no one in contemporary crime fiction who has managed to combine the visceral and the humane as well as Val McDermid ! She's the best we've got' New York Times 'Good pace, enough blood to make us feel that murder is far from cold and clinical, and, best of all, characters you believe in' Maeve Binchy, Mail on Sunday 'McDermid has become our leading pathologist of everyday evil, and she both thrills and scares in this tale of celebrity stalking with a difference ! The subtle orchestration of terror is masterful' Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

Independent
‘Val McDermid is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic on the crime-writing road’