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1984. The National miners' strike is dividing the country, and in a struggling coal-mining town, the miners and their families are living at the edge of their resources. They have no money, and there is no food or heating. On the 14th of December, five miners break ranks to travel to Nottingham and work. For those who stay behind, this is an unforgivable betrayal, and the men are branded as scabs. 23 years later, a young woman is asking the police to trace her missing father: miner Mick Prentice vanished, never to be seen again, although money has been sent to his family; he was widely considered to be one of the scabs. Soon, D I Karen Pirie and DS Phil Parharta find themselves investigating a forgotten disappearance.

This is the provocative premise of Val McDermid's latest novel, A Darker Domain, and this utterly compelling book is further proof that McDermid is determined to stretch the parameters of what crime fiction is supposedly capable of. McDermid has always been prepared to freight serious issues into her work, and this novel -- which, in many ways, is an examination of the conditions that produced the Britain we live in today -- demonstrates the continuing high level of her ambition.

In fact, Karen Pirie, when taking on this new assignment, is already involved in a case of kidnapping that took place 22 years earlier (in which a woman was killed during a bungled handover of money). Journalist Bel Richmond makes a startling discovery concerning the MacLennan kidnapping while on holiday in Tuscany, and as the three protagonists dig deeper into ever-more labyrinthine mysteries, they are to make some remarkable discoveries -- discoveries which throw light not just on the crimes involved, but on the whole of British society.

As all of this might suggest, the stakes here are as high as one is likely to find in a crime novel, and Val McDermid demonstrates that she is as capable as ever of integrating the demands of the page-turning crime narrative with a discussion of the things that make society tick. McDermid fans who may be lamenting the fact that this is not another novel featuring Dr Tony Hill will quickly change their minds as A Darker Domain exerts its cobra-like grip. --Barry Forshaw

Review
Praise for Val McDermid's psychological thrillers: 'Absorbing modern mystery! McDermid's mix of historical and literary clues with modern detection is handled with panache' The Times 'One of the world's leading mystery writers!Thomas Harris crossed with Agatha Christie, if you will! a great read' Observer 'A cleverly plotted thriller. It should gain her a crowd of new fans' Guardian 'One of her best' Literary Review 'A real page-turner and another McDermid triumph' Observer 'McDermid's plot is a classic, and she pulls out all the stops to achieve a sense of mounting anguish, as her hero juggles multiple red herrings, mixed loyalties, differing police agendas and complicated family ties. Impeccable' Guardian 'Reminiscent of one of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine thrillers -- a few more sly, old-fashioned whodunits like this and she'll join the sturdy ranks of the queens of crime, on course to become Dame Val or Baroness McDermid' Sunday Times

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Customer Reviews

25 Reviews

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3 star:		(5)
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3.7 out of 5 stars (25 customer reviews)

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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Starts with a bang, ends with a whimper, 5 Sep 2008

By	M. D. Smart (London, UK) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Val McDermid is best known for her gory serial-killer thrillers featuring Dr Tony Hill, but personally I have always preferred her stand-alone novels such as 'A Place Of Execution.' In these she tones down the violence of her other work and focuses more on the psychology of her characters, which I find far more engrossing than the wince-inducing torture and depravity Tony Hill and Carol Jordan regularly face - although I do enjoy the Hill books too. This, her latest, doesn't altogether count as a stand-alone novel, as it is a sequel of sorts to an earlier book, 'A Distant Echo' (and anyone who intends to read that book should do so before this one, as 'A Darker Domain' reveals its predecessor's ending), but in style and tone this is very much one of her slow-burning psychological thrillers.

In fact, for the majority of the book it represents the author at her best: the characters are believable, the dialogue convincing and the plot gripping. The story concerns two cold cases which originated within a few weeks of each other at the end of 1984 and beginning of 1985. One is the disappearance of a striking miner, the other is the kidnapping of the daughter and grandson of a wealthy and influential businessman. Gradually new evidence is uncovered which suggests there may have been a link between the two events, and it's up to DI Karen Pirie and journalist Bel Richmond to uncover the long-buried truth. The Miners Strike forms a backdrop to the story; Val McDermid grew up in a mining community and her passionate anger as she describes the hardships suffered brings home just how devastating the consequences were for the miners and their families. It all adds up to a rich, thought-provoking read.

However, a couple of major flaws emerge towards the end. Firstly, the solution to what exactly happened in the past and how the two cases are linked is actually quite obvious. Not all the details, but the main points. I kept expecting a big twist to turn the plot on its head, but it never came; there is a minor surprise at the very end, but nothing to make the reader gasp in shock. The second flaw, the one which came close to ruining the book for me, was the ending. The solution of the cases and the tying up of loose ends takes place in just TWO pages. It's almost as if the author ran out of time, or simply lost interest and decided to wrap things up as quickly as possible. One minute the investigation seems doomed - two pages later and it's all over. I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a novel's ending. Over three hundred pages gradually building to a climax and then a few bald paragraphs as the payoff.

Val McDermid is undoubtedly a talented writer who has produced some excellent thrillers over the years. 'A Darker Domain' starts so well I really thought it was destined to be another, but I ended up feeling disappointed and rather cheated. It's still worth 3 stars, because the majority of the book is highly enjoyable, but prepare yourself for a damp squib of a conclusion.

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26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Val's back to her best again, 4 Sep 2008

By	OEJ (England) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

They say form is temporary, class is permanent. So it proves to be with Val McDermid's new mystery-suspense tale which, after a couple of slightly disappointing efforts in recent years, shows that when the lady is on her home turf and writing in the way she feels most comfortable with, she's pretty much untouchable.

As most of the many characters are new, this could be classified as a stand-alone, a one-off, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it could be the first (arguably the second) in a series featuring DI Karen Pirie, who appeared less prominently as a DS in A DISTANT ECHO. She may be physically very different but it's inevitable that comparisons will be made between her and McDermid's best-known female police officer, DI Carol Jordan who first appeared in THE MERMAIDS SINGING some thirteen years ago. If I had to suggest in what way they differ, it would be that Pirie is just that little bit more likeable, with a warmer sense of humour. The only other characters I can remember that appeared in A DISTANT ECHO five years earlier are DC Parhatka and ACC Lawson but the links are rather too tenuous to regard this new novel as a sequel, and the prominence or importance of the characters common to both tales has shifted somewhat. But anyone familiar with ACC Lawson from the earlier novel will doubtless be interested to learn 'how he is doing now'!

This is a very complex story but to summarise, it's a tale of Cold Case expert Pirie looking into the disappearance of a Scottish coal miner twenty-two years earlier, while in parallel to this a female journalist stumbles across a dilapidated villa in Italy containing clues to the unsolved murder of a wealthy heiress in the same year: 1985. It's a book without any chapters as such, instead the whole story is told in snippets leaping backwards and forwards in time, mainly between the mid-1980s and the present day, 2007. Although I couldn't do it myself, I would recommend anyone who has the time or capacity to read this story in one single sitting to do so if possible. It's so complicated and so full of characters and events that if it is read over a period of several days the reader might need to make notes as to who's related to who, who did what and when, and how the different story strands link up with each other. It's definitely a story that demands concentration for the best reward; a lazy reader might easily forget the significance of a date or event and as a consequence miss out on its eventual relevance much later. For example, the apparently meaningless opening paragraph needs to be memorised as it will have huge significance as the tale unfolds.

I sensed that there was a lot of what matters most (or used to matter) to the author in certain elements of the story. For a start, the locations in and around Fife, and specifically its tight-knit mining communities must be very important as Val McDermid grew up there herself, and it must be assumed that even today she holds deep-set emotions about the effects of the miners' strike of the mid-1980s. It's not hard to assume, either, that Mrs Thatcher - the British Prime Minister at that time - is not on Val's Christmas card list, indeed I felt slightly uncomfortable with the language used in both narrative and in dialogue to describe Mrs Thatcher, who at the time of this review is still alive albeit in very poor health. While I have no doubt that the emotions expressed regarding the plight of coal miners and their families is accurate and in no way over-stated, at times it did feel as if the author was using what is fundamentally a fictional tale to give vent to some of her own personal political beliefs. It was vivid and effective, but in the context of the story it had really very little to do with the key events of kidnap and murder, the events upon which the entire story is based. Definitely interesting and revealing, but slightly at odds with the plot.

DI Pirie is drawn into a missing-person search, but one with a difference. A woman with a son in urgent need of a bone-marrow transplant meets with Pirie and asks her to find the only suitable donor: her father Mick Prentice, a coal miner who vanished without trace in 1985. At about the same time, the kidnapped daughter of an immensely wealthy industrialist was murdered during what turned out to be a botched handover of a ransom, and her baby son, also kidnapped, disappeared and was presumed dead. This is the story that interests journalist Bel Richmond and which leads her to Tuscany as a kind of private investigator for the tycoon Sir Broderick Grant who has always wondered what happened to his grandson and heir to the fortune.

For the many familiar with the Tony Hill-Carol Jordan series, this is several notches down in terms of action and violence, but it does have some occasional touches of humour and certainly a high level of drama throughout. None of the characters have the enigmatic draw of Tony Hill, but overall I would say that of the five stand-alone thrillers that McDermid has written, this one stands second only to the magnificent A PLACE OF EXECUTION. An intelligent and convoluted plot, demanding concentration at all times just to follow all the countless threads, but rewarding the reader in the end.

Incidentally, THE FEVER OF THE BONE will be published later in 2009 by Little, Brown and will be the sixth novel to feature clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan, and yet again it takes them into uncharted waters. That's going straight on to my Wish List!

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You Can't Go Wrong with Val McDermid, 11 Mar 2009

By	Sara Hackett (from the Darkside) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Michelle Prentice Gibson, called Misha walks into the police station in Fife, Scotland to report a missing person. The man at the desk thinks it's the usual, missing boyfriend or lover, but when Misha says she's reporting her missing father and that he'd vanished two dozen years ago, all of a sudden he's interested and he sends her up to the Cold Case team headed by Detective Inspecter Karen Pirie and seconded by Detective Sergeant Phil Parhatka.

Reporter Anabel "Bel" Richmond is on vacation in Tuscany and is out for a jog when she spies an abandoned villa and decides to investigate. She stumbles across a recently printed poster and a body's worth of dried blood on a stone floor. She knows instinctively that someone was murdered there and the poster is identical to one used in a ransom note twenty-four years ago.

The police and the reporter are going to collided in this excellent mystery thriller that weaves time and people together in a way only Val McDermid can. Ms. McDermid has filled her book with characters you're going to love and characters you're going to hate and she wraps them with emotion and suspense and ties it all up into a dynamite mystery. But why would you be surprised, everybody knows you can't go wrong with a Val McDermid book.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Engaging but where's the puzzle?
Before reading A Darker Domain, I had only read Val McDermid's Tony Hill series of books which are some of the most accomplished, intelligent crime fiction available today... Read more

Published 7 hours ago by Book Scout

4.0 out of 5 stars Not usually a McDermid fan but this is really good
Really enjoyed this - although perhaps a bit obvious once the pieces are all lined up. Shocking at the end though. Read more

Published 11 days ago by Freya Fowles

4.0 out of 5 stars Another corker
I've been a fan of Val McDermid since her Women's Press days with Lindsey Gordon though have to confess that the Tony Hill books are a bit too gory for me so I don't really read... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Isabelle Kerr

3.0 out of 5 stars Was there a tight deadline?
This is the first book I've read by Val McDermid. I've really enjoyed the tv serialisation of Wire In The Blood and finding out Val McDermid was the writer is what led me to her -... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Louise

5.0 out of 5 stars good book
This was our book club book not one i would have chosen& what a mistake that would have been it was a great read was sorry to finish it.good plot & well written.

Published 1 month ago by D. J. Fisher

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Great storylines which kept me turning the pages.
I agree with some of the other reviewers in that the mysteries of the plots can be worked out easily and also that the... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Anon

2.0 out of 5 stars Not up to standard
Having read most of Val McDermids work and really enjoyed it, I was really disappointed with this one. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Mrs. G. Macdonald

3.0 out of 5 stars Strangely unsatisfying from the great Val McDermid
I have loved many of Val McDermid's books but this wasn't one of my favourites. She herself grew up in a mining community and so she's good at identifying the tensions that might... Read more

Published 1 month ago by emma who reads a lot

3.0 out of 5 stars A good light holiday read,but.....
This was a good holiday read and I can't say I didn't enjoy it as such,but like most people I had guessed the two main "twists" quite early on. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Jadi

2.0 out of 5 stars Predictable but okay.
I'd be surprised if it won any awards. It started off well enough but fizzled out into predictability and and an end that didn't seem finished. Read more

Published 1 month ago by J. Turner

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