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Val McDermid - The Distant Echo

ISBN: 0007217161

Just begun this novel and delighted to find it in the library after my new thrift policy eschewing spending lots in Tesco or Amazon!

Very atmospheric from the first page. There is a rhythm perhaps to thriller writing in particular that perhaps emanates from the play on 'fatedness' in such narratives. For retrospect in a thriller is loaded with tension and implication. The 'clue' is a gateway to disaster as much as enlightenment and this novel by McDermid begins with a doomladen Prologue whose last sentence contains the word 'vengeance'.
Perhaps too, there is a correspondence between a medical history and a thriller, for both are involved in the act of 'reading' and the problematic possibility of diagnosis. What may seem illegible becomes legible. Indeed all detection is about imperatives to gain knoweledge and attention. Yet in this novel so far, the emphasis seems a diversion and yet, perhaps that is a trick in itself. Incongruity is not necessarily a sign of guilt, nor is the familiar ( and therefore unnoticeable) necessarily any proof of innocence.

I await the time shift with eager anticipation!

The opening chapters so far explore the extreme tensions surrounding proof of innocence. Four St Andrews' University students discover a dying girl in a snow laden cemetery, notify the police and then find they are the main suspects in what will prove an unsolved 'cold case' until the novel opens again and the advent of DNA and new policing skills makes the possibility of resolution more hopeful.

So far, so bleak. The littering of cultural references like Ziggy Stardust and Pink Floyd( it is 1978) are rather different to Ian Rankin's Rebus, probably because the latter is a man always out of his time and such references to past icons serve to reinforce his ironic 'lostness' and psychological separation from his world. Here, McDermid adds intensity and credibility to the past in order to underline its continuing and contaminating influence on the present.

So far, so good. Utterly readable!

Reviewed By: Janet Lewison

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