A Darker Domain by Val McDermid

As she spoke, she reached for the phone that had just begun to ring. There were other, more junior officers in the big squad room that housed the Cold Case Review Team, but promotion hadn’t altered Karen’s ways. She’d never got out of the habit of answering any phone that rang in her vicinity. “CCRT, DI Pirie speaking,” she said absently . . . .

This is just page 3 but McDermid provides most of the information we need: Karen Pirie, somewhat of an afterthought in The Distant Echo, is now a Detective Inspector running cold case investigations in Fife yet isn’t too important to answer the phone herself. And when the story begins, she meets with a walk-in, a young woman reporting her father has been missing for more than 22 years, having disappeared during the national miners’ strike in 1984. 

Separately, Karen has a higher profile case that her annoying new boss wants her to prioritize. Sir Broderick Maclennan Grant is a wealthy man whose daughter was kidnapped and murdered by an anarchist group at roughly the same time. No one knows if her infant son survived but a journalist has found new information about the kidnappers, so Sir Broderick is eager for the police to make another (and, he snaps, more successful) attempt to investigate the case – although he is playing off the journalist against DI Pirie, which doesn’t end well.

Karen is an interesting character, conscientious and smart rather than attractive, snide when she needs to be, and nursing a crush on one of her colleagues. Through flashbacks, the reader learns a lot about the miners’ strike and the brutal way it affected their families. While they were suffering, Sir Broderick’s willful daughter was becoming a glass sculptor. Karen does not expect the two cases to be connected (this reader did!) but she comes up with creative ways to investigate the missing miner with the help of Detective Sergeant Phil Parhartka:

Part of the recipe for that job satisfaction was having someone to bounce ideas off. No individual detective was smart enough to see the whole picture of a complex investigation. Everyone needed a sounding board who saw things differently and was smart enough to articulate these differences. It was especially important in cold cases where, instead of leading a substantial team of officers, an SIO might have only one or two bodies at her disposal. And those foot soldiers usually didn’t have the experience to make their input as valuable as she wanted. For Karen, Phil ticked all the boxes. And judging by the number of times he ran his cases past her, it was a two-way street.

I really enjoyed the pace of this mystery as well as Karen and Phil’s collaboration, unlike the weird relationship of the characters in McDermid’s extremely dark series about Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. In 2016, McDermid visited Wellesley Books, where I was not the only attendee drooling over her Scottish accent. She was an entertaining raconteur and autographed her book, Vanishing Point, for me. She said growing up, she valued the library because there weren’t a lot of books in her home. That got a sympathetic murmur from the audience.

This is my fourth mystery of the year for Carol’s Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.  I will definitely continue with this series.

Title: A Darker Domain, DI Pirie #1
Author: Val McDermid
Publication: HarperCollins, hardcover, 2009
Setting: 20th and 21st century Scotland and Italy
Genre: Mystery/series
Source: Library