The Distant Echo - Softcover

McDermid, Val

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312994834 ISBN 13: 9780312994839

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2004

Synopsis

Twenty-five years after an unsolved rape and murder, four best friends, having been falsely accused of the crime, find themselves targeted by someone who still believes that they are guilty, prompting one of them to launch a desperate search for the real killer. Reprint.

About this title

Product Description:

Title: The Distant Echo <>Binding: Mass Market Paperback <>Author: ValMcDermid <>Publisher: St.Martin'sPress

Review:

Val McDermid's The Distant Echo is, even more so than with her previous work, a masterpiece of trickery and misdirection. In 1978, four male students find the body of Rosie Duff half-buried in the snow and their lives are variously damaged by the suspicion that falls on them when the murder is never solved; a quarter of a century later, the case is reopened and suddenly the quartet start to be killed one after the other.

This is an effective thriller because it is so intelligent about the ways in which time changes things--secrets that seemed important become trivial and investigative techniques become ever more accurate. It is also intelligent about the ways in which things do not change--the friendships of the four men persist even when one becomes a fundamentalist preacher and another a post-modern literary theorist. Unusually for McDermid, this is a very Scots book as well--the investigating officers Maclennan and Lawson are very much men of a particular time and place. McDermid has a real sense of how to make forensic details count in a murder story--she also, more importantly, has a heart--this is a novel that makes us care passionately about victims and suspects alike. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312994834
• ISBN 13: 9780312994839
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback