This is the third of the three books by this author that I picked up cheaply in charity shops or library discard sales recently, and of the three was the one I enjoyed the most until the ending rather undercut that. It is one of a series about Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, but I found it worked as a standalone novel. Unusually, it takes the Balkans conflicts as its background, which I haven't encountered as a setting for fiction previously.

Early on in the story, skeletal remains are found on the roof of an abandoned building and analysis of the teeth and a metal plate in the leg indicate work done in Eastern Europe. Identification of the body leads Pirie to make contact with a professor in Oxford, Maggie Blake, who has built a career upon the geopolitics of the Balkan states, following on from time spent there during the wars that took place, and her personal involvement with the dead man.

The story interweaves various narratives. As well as the more interesting thread which follows the investigation by DCI Pirie and her sidekick, for some of the time we are unfortunately forced to follow a couple of unlikeable lawyers who are attached to the organisation which is meant to be bringing war criminals to justice. Their organisation is shortly going to be wound up, but a new boss wants a solution to the violent deaths which have been meted out to several war criminals before they could be brought to trial, indicating that there is an intelligence leak in their organisation. Another thread is the POV of Professor Blake and a third is her memoir of the Balkans conflicts. The latter is a technique the author used in the previous book I read, A Trick of Dark and I found myself wondering why she didn't instead use a series of flashbacks to impart the information with vitality as other writers would have done. The memoir form came across as rather dry and bit boring. Usually, as in the previous book, its use indicates an unreliable narrator who doesn't set down how things really happened, something far more difficult to pull off if their actual POV in a "live" narrative is presented, but Blake isn't so much unreliable as unaware of what was going on. A key fact is presented in one chunk of this autobiography about three quarters through the book - which immediately clued me in to who the murderer must be.

And therein lay the problem because I didn't find it convincing that this person could have pulled off the types of violent attack described in the prologue. I also found the resolution rather ridiculous, especially the late-on insistence that a key character's nearest and dearest (trying to avoid spoilers) should be forcibly removed. It had been a pleasant surprise to discover that this series had escaped the usual cliche in detective novels of the embittered lonely driven individual with no family life, but presumably this event is meant to restore that status quo. Anyway, I found its outcome melodramatic and unnecessary, and it reduced my rating for this book from a 4 to a 3 star. ( )

Gripping and raw subject on the Kosovo war. Two close girl friends and a former general's relationship seem fine. Two are secretely married but the general just disappears and the girls comfort each other. 10 years later a skeleton with a bullett is found in a high confined space.
Detective Price tirelessly uncovers the truth.
Val McDermid has developed a superb plot covering a difficult unfathomable subject of the depravity of human nature. ( )

3.5 stars. So many layers of human sadness in this one. ( )

I've had this on my shelf for years and I can't remember why I picked it up all those years ago. I didn't realize it was part of a series, but that didn't seem to matter to the story. This is a police procedural but it covers several countries and the brutal war in Croatia. There's stomach-churning history, complicated friendships, and bloody pasts. I think the history and setting were the best part of this, the mystery definitely played second fiddle. ( )

Karen Pirie is the chief of cold cases in Police Scotland, so when a skeleton shows up in a tower of an abandoned building in Edinburgh, she investigates. It turns out that the man is a Croatian general who came to the UK after the end of the Croatian War of Independence.
It's a good mystery with a lot of information I didn't know about that war and the Balkan peninsula - sometimes too much so as the author chose to insert knowledge drops every few chapters in the form of a manuscript an Oxford professor was writing. It broke up the crime parts just a bit too much for me, though I found the information interesting.
The story is combined with a vigilante who is killing Serbian war criminals before they can be brought to justice. The macro level of 'eye for an eye' in the war brought down to an individual level meshed the two stories well.
The characters are engaging, and the author is well-known for her long series of murder procedurals. Definitely a good read. ( )