Val McDermid, The Distant Echo

Just begun this McDermid novel The Distant Echo and delighted to find it in the library after my new thrift policy eschewing spending lots in Tesco or Amazon! The Distant Echo is very atmospheric from the first page. There is a rhythm perhaps to thriller writing in particular that perhaps emanates from the play on 'fatedness' in such narratives. For retrospect in a thriller is loaded with tension and implication. The 'clue' is a gateway to disaster as much as enlightenment and this novel by McDermid begins with a doomladen Prologue whose last sentence contains the word 'vengeance'.

Perhaps too, there is a correspondence between a medical history and a thriller, for both are involved in the act of 'reading' and the problematic possibility of diagnosis. What may seem illegible becomes legible. Indeed all detection is about imperatives and attention. Yet in this novel so far, the emphasis seems a diversion and yet, perhaps that is a trick in itself. Incongruity is not necessarily a sign of guilt, nor is the familiar ( and therefore unnoticeable) necessarily any proof of innocence.

I await the time shift with eager anticipation!

The opening chapters so far explore the extreme tensions surrounding four students 'prooof of innocence. Four St Andrews' University students discover a dying girl in a snow laden cemetery, notify the police and then find they are the main suspects in what will prove an unsolved 'cold case' until the novel opens again and the advent of DNA and new policing skils makes the possibility of resolution more hopeful.

So far, so bleak. The littering of cultural references like Ziggy Stardust and Pink Floyd( it is 1978) are rather different to Ian Rankin's Rebus, probably because the latter is a man always out of his time and such references to past icons serve to reinforce his ironic 'lostness' and psychological separation from his world. Here, McDermid adds intensity and credibility to the past in order to underline its continuing and contaminating influence on the present.

So far, so good. Utterly readable!

Top notch and accessible yet intelligent writing. The characters are well created and realistic. I felt as if I knew them by the end of Val McDermid, The Distant Echo!

Place, atmosphere and time are beautifully created. The crime takes place in St Andrews, when the boys from Kirkcaldy are all together at Uni. Years later, the crime comes back to trouble them and the need to solve it become apparent.

There's no reason not to buy this book! Even if you don't read thrillers normally, buy this. McDermid's prose is a joy to read.

Val McDermid, The Distant Echo - Winter 1978, St Andrews, Scotland, four students on their way back from a party stumble in the snow upon a dying young woman and their lives change forever. Tainted by suspicion but never charged with the murder of Rosie, the quartet's lifelong friendship is put to the test while they doubt each other's innocence. A true ordeal by innocence that will haunt them all over again 25 yrs later, when a police task-force reopens the case and mysterious accidents are shortening the suspects' list.

The old case must be solved to prevent other killings.