It's April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot-the streets all but empty, an hour's outdoor exercise the maximum allowed-but a mere pandemic doesn't mean crime takes a holiday. When a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie's team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it's game on again. At the center of it, a novel: two crime novelists facing off over a chessboard. But it quickly emerges that their real-life competition is drawing blood. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, and as Karen and her team attempt to disentangle fact from fiction, it becomes clear that this case is more complicated than they ever imagined.
Val McDermid manages to stay at the top of her game in her latest ... cDermid, an avid gamer and early adopter of social media, moves effortlessly between scenes of a musty archive, old-fashioned shoe leather and cutting-edge technology. She captures the camaraderie of those who toil in the keyboard trenches and the never-ending competition for the spoils of literary success.
In the series’s seventh installment, the team find themselves at loose ends at the beginning of the pandemic. (Setting Past Lying during the coronavirus was a gutsy move, since the conventional wisdom is that pandemic books don’t sell. Luckily, the Scottish Queen of Crime ignored this) ... McDermid has a high old time satirizing Scotland’s crime-fiction scene, portraying it as a misogynist hive of gossip, backbiting, and awards envy ... McDermid outdoes herself with the thorny, semi-meta plot; even the book within a book, a device that can be tedious, is irresistible. Trying to figure out who’s playing whom while relishing McDermid’s behind-the-scenes take on Tartan Noir should keep readers up past their bedtimes.
...it’s absorbing, even compelling, splendidly puzzling, very clever, but thrilling it isn’t. It’s a puzzle novel. The reader is encouraged to find the way to the centre of a maze. The plot is improbable, but this doesn’t matter any more than it does in the best Agatha Christie novels ... McDermid plots her novels in masterly style. She holds the reader’s attention and provokes our curiosity. She keeps her narrative jogging along, and I doubt if many will lay aside this book, slow though the narrative often is. Her ingenuity commands respect, and she has the necessary novelistic gift of making the implausible seem right. This takes some doing, especially since the centrepiece of this book is unlikely. It takes skill to make the improbable ring true ... Val McDermid is deservedly popular and now acclaimed as the Queen of Crime. She is a fine carpenter, her books always well-constructed. She has the confidence to take her time in the telling of her story and even though the elaborate plot at the centre of this novel borders on the incredible, she brings it off with admirable efficiency. At her best and, despite my dislike of her DCI Pirie, she is at her ingenious best here, she is almost in the PD James and Ruth Rendell class.
