Silent Bones by Val McDermid, Sphere (Little Brown Book Group) London. Hbk: 2025, 448pp, rrp £22.00. Pbk: 2026; rrp £10.99.
This is Val McDermid’s latest Karen Pirie crime thriller. Two others, The Darker Domain and The Distant Echo, have already been adapted for television. This, the eighth featuring DCI Karen Pirie and her team who make up Edinburgh’s Historic Cases Unit (HCU), touches on the corrupt and sordid side of Scottish politics.
This one, Silent Bones, begins with a mud-slide which unearths the body of a murdered investigative journalist. Meanwhile the death of a hotel manager, originally believed to be an accident, soon turns out to be suspicious. The HCU soon discover the two deaths to be interlinked. They unearth the cover up of a violent rape at a pro-independence event as well as betting and match fixing scams featuring a shady elite book club called the ‘Justified Sinners’. But the ‘Sinners’ is more like a masonic lodge than a book club where potential members will literally kill to gain admittance.
The Justified Sinners, a reference to an 1824 novel by James Hogg, is based on the Protestant concept of Predestination. where members of the “elect” can commit any sin they like as they are guaranteed a place in heaven – an obvious swipe at the Calvinist dogma of the Church of Scotland. This could also be a reference to the Epstein Files, where men from elite backgrounds are engaged in criminal and degenerate behaviour including paedophilia.
Meanwhile DCI Pirie and her team come to life as real characters as their complex personal lives weave into the story. Both of her assistants, Detective Sergeants Jason Murray and Daisy Mortimer, manage to use their partners in the investigation while Karen Pirie, a single woman in her thirties ends a relationship with her Syrian refugee lover. This backstory is an example of McDermid’s liberalism which views the Assad Government as the epitome of evil whilst portraying the new regime cobbled together from various Al Qaeda affiliates as an opportunity to re-build the country. She overlooks the persecution of religious minorities, not to mention the privatisation of national assets and collaboration with the murderous Zionist state by the new regime.
The novel also delves into the differences between English and Scottish law. In England, an arrest must be necessary for specific reasons. In Scotland, an officer can arrest if they have reasonable grounds to suspect an offence was committed.
This is a thoroughly well written, great thriller but is also testimony to the author’s bourgeois liberalism. McDermid sees corruption and degenerate behaviour as something that can be rooted out rather than an integral part of capitalism. We’ve heard that one before...
The Justified Sinners, a reference to an 1824 novel by James Hogg, is based on the Protestant concept of Predestination. where members of the “elect” can commit any sin they like as they are guaranteed a place in heaven – an obvious swipe at the Calvinist dogma of the Church of Scotland. This could also be a reference to the Epstein Files, where men from elite backgrounds are engaged in criminal and degenerate behaviour including paedophilia.
Meanwhile DCI Pirie and her team come to life as real characters as their complex personal lives weave into the story. Both of her assistants, Detective Sergeants Jason Murray and Daisy Mortimer, manage to use their partners in the investigation while Karen Pirie, a single woman in her thirties ends a relationship with her Syrian refugee lover. This backstory is an example of McDermid’s liberalism which views the Assad Government as the epitome of evil whilst portraying the new regime cobbled together from various Al Qaeda affiliates as an opportunity to re-build the country. She overlooks the persecution of religious minorities, not to mention the privatisation of national assets and collaboration with the murderous Zionist state by the new regime.
The novel also delves into the differences between English and Scottish law. In England, an arrest must be necessary for specific reasons. In Scotland, an officer can arrest if they have reasonable grounds to suspect an offence was committed.
This is a thoroughly well written, great thriller but is also testimony to the author’s bourgeois liberalism. McDermid sees corruption and degenerate behaviour as something that can be rooted out rather than an integral part of capitalism. We’ve heard that one before...
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