Star Struck (PI Kate Brannigan, Book 6) - Hardcover

McDermid, Val

3.8

1,664 ratings by Goodreads

9780002325851: Star Struck (PI Kate Brannigan, Book 6)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002325853 ISBN 13: 9780002325851

Publisher: Collins Crime, 1998

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‘This is crime writing of the very highest order ... Kate Brannigan has turned into the most interesting sleuthess around’ The Times

Bodyguarding had never made it to Manchester PI Kate Brannigan’s wish list. But somebody’s got to pay the bills at Brannigan & Co, and if the only earner on offer is playing nursemaid to a paranoid soap star, the fast-talking computer-loving white collar crime expert has to swallow her pride and slip into something more glam than her Thai boxing kit.

Then offstage dramas threaten to overshadow the fictional storylines till the unscripted murder of the self-styled ‘Seer to the Stars’ stops the show,
leaving Kate with more questions than answers.

And you just can’t get the help these days. Her process server keeps getting arrested; her tame hacker has found virtual love; her best friend is besotted with baby; and the normally reliable Dennis has had the temerity to get himself arrested for murder as a result of his latest dodgy business venture.

Nobody told her there’d be days like these...

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Review:

All series thrillers have an element of the soap opera about them, and so it is logical that Val McDermid's sixth novel about Manchester private eye Kate Brannigan should take her into the world of television soaps. Tough computer-literate Brannigan is hired as bodyguard to the star of Northerners, which bears an uncanny resemblance to another soap filmed in Manchester. Brassy Gloria has been warned by her clairvoyant that death is in the offing, but it is the clairvoyant who gets her skull smashed with a crystal ball. Meanwhile, someone is leaking plot lines, Kate's burglar chum is accused of murder when he takes up honest work, and her staff find themselves in sexual predicaments.

There is a charm to all of this, and some intelligent puzzles competently worked through; McDermid knows, or competently invents, the social milieux she describes. The book is particularly good on the feel of the Northwest on a raw winter day--McDermid's writing gets better and better. This book, though, lacks some of the vigour of the earlier Brannigan books and their note of social protest. Her fans will have no complaints, but this is not the best of her books. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

‘Stunningly exciting, horrifyingly good’
Ruth Rendell

‘This book has a sense of gravitas and intelligence utterly beyond lesser writers in the field’
Ian Rankin

‘Terrific chiller from Manchester’s answer to Thomas Harris’
Guardian

‘A clever and exciting thriller’
Sunday Telegraph

‘A compelling combination of sexual-political mischief and Jacobean psychological intensity’
Sunday Times (of The Wire in the Blood)

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