The Distant Echo
Shortlisted for the 2005 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime
Novel of the Year
HarperCollins 2003
Synopsis:
Four in the morning,
mid-December, and snow is smothering St Andrews. Student Alex Gilbey
and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when
they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been
raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery.
And the only suspects are the four young students stained with her
blood. Twenty-five years later, Fife police mount a cold case review.
Among the unsolved murders they're examining is that of Rosie Duff.
But someone else has their own idea of how justice should be done.
One of the original quartet dies in a suspicious house fire. Soon
after, a second is killed in what looks like a burglary gone sour.
But Alex fears the worst. Someone is taking revenge for Rosie Duff.
He has to find out who it is before he becomes the next victim.
And it might just save his life if he can uncover who really killed
Rosie all those years ago.
Amazon.co.uk 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
'The plotting is impeccable, the atmosphere palpable,
and I doubt that it will be surpassed this year'. Sunday
Express
'Val McDermid is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic
on the crime-writing road'. Independent
