Karen Pirie has been commissioned for ITV by Head of Drama, Polly Hill. Drama Commissioner Huw Kennair Jones will oversee production from the channel’s perspective. On 23 October 2016 McDermid married her partner of two years, Jo Sharp, a professor of geography at the University of Glasgow. [34] [35] Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow blankets St. Andrews School. Student Alex Gilbery and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery. The only suspects are the four young students stained with her blood. It’s also rare for a show’s creative team to be so young. Lyle has her first lead role at 29 in a show steered by the 32-year-old Kenny as writer and executive producer. Kenny also co-stars, playing DS Pirie’s best friend, River. Nearly 25 years on, DS Karen Pirie is determined to uncover what happened that fateful night. Do the men know more than they previously revealed? When Karen uncovers flaws in the initial investigation, she finds herself in conflict with the very officers who led the original hunt for the killer.

I was very aware of being a young showrunner,” says Kenny. “So I wanted to try to do something new with the mainstream ITV crime brand. My mantra was ‘cool and fresh’, which I said so often people were eye-rolling at me.”

Broadcasts

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Val McDermid talks about the novels that have influenced her in the Guardian bookshop challenge, 7 June 2010. Twenty-five years on, the case comes up as a cold case which it might be possible to clear up with advances made in forensic science in the intervening years and DI Karen Pirie is one of the officers involved. It's quite a close-knit community in the police - the officer in the patrol car a quarter of a century before is now the Assistant Chief Constable, but there's trouble locating all the evidence and it looks as though progress is going to be slow. Then two of the erstwhile students are murdered.

More visceral is the mistrust she establishes between the four friends, the police and the murdered girl’s family. She keeps you believing that first one, then another of the four was responsible for Rosie McDuff’s death.The best recent thrillers – review roundup". the Guardian. 7 September 2021 . Retrieved 16 April 2022. And oh, Karen Pirie is barely a character here. I suppose, since it's her first appearance in the series, she gets to be No. 1. Flash forward to present day - or 2003. What happens then and how it's resolved is one big ball of confusion. I kept thinking - what, how, where, why? It all does make sense - in hindsight - as to how things are resolved, but I finished the book while shaking my head. So a good enough mystery, a C+ in my rating system, but certainly not among the best I've ever read. McDermid, Val (5 April 2016). "Scotland is now a place where you can be glad to be gay". The Guardian.

Anna Burnside (2 September 2016). "Straight-talking Val McDermid lifts lid on her latest novel and why she's the badass woman of the week". Daily Record . Retrieved 25 October 2016. Sally Rowena Munt (1994). Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel. Routledge. p. 67. ISBN 0415109191. The book is long but the writing is so outstanding that I never stopped reading it except to rest my aging eyes. The only part that disappointed me, a bit, was the ending, which felt rushed. It was here that the character of Pirie could have been deepened, but instead we receive only a second-hand recounting of the final investigation and arrest. I wonder if McDermid decided to cut down part of the ending so that the focus remained squarely on Alex and how “suspicion” can mar lives. The second part of the novel takes place 25 years later. A cold case review is undertaken of the Rosie Duff murder, although it is currently at a standstill as the initial physical evidence has been misplaced. Then one of the four university friends is murdered, a new character who is obviously unbalanced appears, and the lives of the three remaining former friends are thrown again into upheaval.

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to the mystery, not the subplot? - 70% Misc. Murder Plotlets - Proving innocence of very obvious suspect Kind of investigator - police procedural, British Kid or adult book? - Adult or Young Adult Book The novels of celebrated crime writer Val McDermid have sold over 16 million copies worldwide. The Hill Jordan series of novels was adapted into Wire in the Blood starring Robson Green for ITV. Twenty-five years later, the police started a cold case review; technological advances should help convict Rosie’s killer. Within weeks, two men who found Rosie’s body are dead, and another has been beaten to within an inch of his life. The police, however, are reluctant to connect the incidents. The only way the remaining witness can survive is to find out who murdered Rosie all those years ago. Review

McDermid, putting aside her fondness for serial killers (The Last Temptation, 2002, etc.), masterfully presents the 1978 portion of her story but stumbles so badly with melodramatic present-tense plot quirks that readers will be well ahead of Lawson in naming Rosie’s killer.

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I struggle myself,” says Lyle, “with the idea we’re always seeing women murdered on screen. But, in this, we are looking at it through the eyes of a young woman. And, also, the issue isn’t going anywhere: women are still being murdered and we haven’t resolved it. Why should we stop covering it on screen?” I never spook myself, says top Scots crime writer Val McDermid". Daily Record. 31 August 2016 . Retrieved 25 October 2016. Cunningly plotted...McDermid administers the venom drop by drop...Individually the characters are sensitively drawn. Collectively, they present the inscrutable face of closed-off communities so terrified of change they would kill for peace.” — New York Times Book Review