In a novel pulsating with gritty reality, McDermid's heroine, DCI Karen Pirie, truly anchors the story. Her steely demeanor only occasionally betrays vulnerability and a serious desire not just to catch a cold-case killer, but to provide a certain justice for his innocent victim. In her a double-edged whodunit, McDermid connects a familial DNA hit on an unsolved rape/ murder to the mysterious murder/suicide of Gabriel Abbott. A loner and a recluse, Gabriel was found with a gunshot wound to the head, the gun in his hands.

Paralleling Gabriel’s death is that of Ross Garvie, whose life hangs by a thread after a terrible car accident. Ross’s DNA has been tied to the 27-year-old murder of hairdresser Tina MacDonald. Tina was raped and strangled in Glasgow City Center in 1996. The problem is that Ross is only seventeen, so whoever left his DNA on Tina’s body all those years ago must have been a close male relative. At the time, the Strathclyde Police struggled with the case, admitting that they had compelling forensic evidence but no suspects to match it against. Now, with the discovery of Garvie’s DNA, this first definitive lead may take Karen Pirie and her team at Police Scotland to the door of a man who has escaped justice for years.

In Out of Bounds, McDermid taps her usual narrative skill, framing Ross Garvie’s cold-case investigation and Gabriel Abbott’s suspected murder around the domestic and professional trials of Karen. Driven by irrationality and a paranoid instinct in the wake of the loss of her lover, Detective Phil Parhatka, Karen walks the streets of Edinburgh at night, an “unfamiliar place that is laden with just enough memories to ambush her.” In order to take her mind off the constant the grief and pain, Karen navigates the city one street at a time, eventually finding herself amongst a rich stream of humanity--including half a dozen Syrian men who will come to play an integral part in the unfolding story. By day, Karen returns to the poky offices of the Historic Cases Unit, where Garvie’s investigation moves forward thanks to the forensic scientists who routinely re-examine evidence from these old unsolved cases. Helped by the affable Detective Constable Jason Murray (as dexterous as he was quick on the uptake”), Karen feels the familiar adrenaline rush of reopening a cold case as she begins to excavate the past for its secrets.

In a landscape where lives are distorted in one way or another by guilt and shame, Karen’s investigative skills are piqued when old friend Jimmy Hutton tells her about Gabriel Abbott. Driven intellectually and also challenged by her instincts, Karen is never one to admit defeat. Plunging with passion into the investigation, she follows where the case inadvertently leads her, to explore the demise twenty years earlier, of Gabriel’s mother, Caroline Abbott. A successful West End theater impresario, Caroline lost her life when the small plane she was travelling in blew up over the Scottish borders. The four people on board died instantly. The case looked open and shut, even though nobody came forward to claim responsibility. On the face of it, there was nothing to link the murder of Caroline with that of her son. Karen, however, is unconvinced that a so-called IRA terrorist bombing and Gabriel’s up-close and personal shooting was perhaps just a tragic coincidence.

Karen’s boss, the arrogant Chief Constable Simon Lees, is determined to make her look foolish and incompetent at every turn, but Karen dives forward. She eventually turns to lawyer Jason Semple for advice on adoption laws and DNA so that the two of them can begin to sort through the many legal quagmires of Garvie’s complicated case. Through no fault of her own, she finds herself drawn into the puzzling death of Carline Abbott. Although this isn’t her enquiry, and it’s really none of her business, there’s something about Gabriel’s life and death that has its hooks in Karen--as if focusing on him might put her own grief on the back burner, even for a short time. A sudden, shocking revelation from Ross Garvie’s mother stalls the investigation, adding to Karen’s increasing state of perpetual unrest. What seemed like a straightforward march to resolving a cold case turns into a multi-layered problem that Karen and Jason have no idea how to attack.

McDermid’s talent is that she can link together all of the story’s disparate plot points with the complexities of contemporary police work. Because this is essentially a “cold case” story, McDermid strategically ties digital forensics and the latest DNA technologies to a clandestine love affair, dark deeds involving Gabriel’s family, and the past actions of Frank Sinclair, a conservative MP who suddenly finds it hard to escape Karen’s penetrating scrutiny. Again and again, Karen is stymied by her vague suspicions and the notion that there is any obvious way to get beyond “the circumstantial to solid prohibitive evidence.” The answer to the many questions raised by DNA is right in front of Karen even as many of the witnesses to both Gabriel’s death and Tina’s murder see only what they want to see. Beyond the fact that DI Alan Noble, the lead detective assigned to Gabriel’s case, is determined to make a lazy and unconvincing push for “a suicide call,” Karen chooses instead to focus on the childhood of Gabriel, a boy who from eight years old seemed trapped in a joyless world.

While many of the secondary characters whom Karen solicits for advice sometimes convolute the novel and don't feel quite as essential to the main plot, they are important for providing context and depth to Karen’s dual investigations and her frail emotional state as she tries to counterbalance the personal and the professional: her insatiable insomnia, her constant talking to Phil, and her obsessions with a case obviously outside of her remit. The end result is that it pains Karen to discover that, as Gabriel’s past proves, real secrets aren’t found in objects, in schedules, in underwear drawers, or in deleted texts, but are lodged far deeper, in photos and newspaper articles, and in the memories that are lodged outside of history, memories perhaps unavailable even to ourselves.

• Still Life (An Inspector Karen Pirie Novel)
• How The Dead Speak: A Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Thriller
• Broken Ground (A Karen Pirie Novel)
• Insidious Intent: A Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Novel
• Splinter the Silence: A Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Novel
• The Skeleton Road
• Northanger Abbey
• Cross and Burn (Tony Hill / Carol Jordan)
• Retribution: A Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Novel
• Fever of the Bone
• Trick of the Dark
• A Darker Domain
• Beneath the Bleeding
• The Grave Tattoo