Val McDermid – A Darker Domain

ISBN: 0007243316

Just read this over a couple of days and really enjoyed the easeful sequencing of past and nearly present. Manages to combine a high profile kidnapping narrative with a very intimate exploration of the miners’ suffering during the infamous strike of the early 1980s. Unlike some of her other novels where forensic investigation is central to the narrative and ‘gore’ is very much explicitly to the fore, this reads like a more old fashioned thriller, perhaps penned by Ruth Rendell’s alter ego Barbara Vine.

I enjoyed the persistence of the female detective and her strongly expressed value system as well as the very engaging romance with her thorny side kick too. I cared!

Great for its exploration of lateral thinking..or NLP ‘reframes’…the detective Pirie gains ascendancy over the obfuscation of others through her willingness to try new ways of reading characters’ translations of events. Again, I felt involved and enjoyed the intelligence and imaginative power of the story telling and detection…

Clever, engrossing and well expressed. My only negative comment was that McDermid seemed to have run out of energy( or paper!) in the last few pages and I felt slightly cheated by the rapidity of the denouement.

Never mind. It was otherwise a most satisfying read!

Reviewed By: Janet Lewison

Posted in Book Reviews