The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid

First published in the UK by Little, Brown in 2014; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 2, 2014

I tend to like Val McDermid's plots while disliking her characters. That pattern held true with The Skeleton Road, which is either a stand-alone novel or (more likely) the first in a series.

As has become common in a certain kind of crime novel, DCI Karen Pirie is quick to tell everyone that she cares about crime victims and their grieving families more than anyone else in the police, or possibly the world. Pirie is a self-righteous, judgmental, self-important bully, which makes her a realistic police detective but an annoying character. Pirie is a clone of Paula McIntyre from McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, another character I find it difficult to stomach. Fortunately, while Pirie's personality never improves, it becomes more tolerable late in the novel as she encounters the kind of misfortune that builds sympathy for even an unsympathetic character.

McDermid follows the fashion trend of adding a forensic anthropologist to the story. The third woman who takes a leading role is Oxford Professor Maggie Blake, who is haunted by memories of the Balkans and is pining for Mitja Petrovic, a Croatian who disappeared from her life eight years earlier. The fourth central female character is a human rights lawyer who is Blake's best friend. In contrast to the brilliant women who carry the story, most male characters are lazy dullards, officious a-holes, or murderers.

While I wasn't fond of the characters, I enjoyed the two intersecting plotlines. The first requires Pirie to solve the mystery of a skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull, found on the roof of an abandoned building. The second involves Balkan war criminals who are being assassinated before they can be hauled into international court, leading some to suspect that there is a leak in the office that investigates and prosecutes the crimes. They also suspect that Petrovic might be the assassin. Two bumbling and bickering Foreign Office lawyers are assigned to track down the leak.

Early chapters generally alternate the development of the separate plotlines, with interludes narrated by Blake as she recalls the romance with Petrovic that began while she was teaching feminist geopolitics in Croatia. The romance (which leaves Blake "weak in the knees") is too predictable and cheesy to be interesting. On the other hand, various scenes that take place in the Balkans give McDermid the opportunity to showcase the power with which she is capable of writing.

Substantial parts of The Skeleton Road are slow moving. That doesn't bother me when a book's setting, characters, or prose capture my attention, but some stretches of the novel struck me as being dull and unnecessary. Had this been a tighter novel, I would have been a happier reader.

Despite its flaws, The Skeleton Road's plot threads eventually cohere into a strong, engaging story. Some aspects -- particularly the willingness of Police Scotland to send Pirie to Croatia in pursuit of a cold case that has generated no particular suspect -- struck me as wildly implausible, but that's common in modern thrillers. The resolution to the novel's key mystery is telegraphed early and I didn't quite believe the killer's motivation for the killings (much less the killer's ability to commit them, a detail that McDermid ignores). Still, I got caught up in the story during the final chapters and that, together with McDermid's fluid prose, is enough to earn my recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 22, 2013

Carol Jordan, unemployed and burdened by her sense of guilt for her brother's death, is getting her life back together (or not) by restoring the barn in which her brother was murdered and by caring for a new dog. Paula McIntyre, a member of Jordan's Major Incident Team with the Bradfield Metropolitan Police before it was broken apart, is newly promoted to Detective Sergeant. Paula would like to investigate the disappearance of Bev McAndrew, whose 14-year-old son is disturbed that she didn't come home, but Paula's new DCI puts her to work on a brutal homicide instead. Paula nonetheless devotes herself to investigating McAndrew's disappearance because disobeying their bosses is standard procedure for fictional police detectives. Soon enough, we learn that a serial killer is kidnapping, tormenting, and killing women who happen to look like Carol. Eventually the evidence points to an unlikely suspect, and it is up to Paula to determine whether that series regular is innocent or guilty.

Val McDermid understands the tendency of police detectives to focus their tunnel vision on the first suspect they encounter, working thereafter to prove that suspect's guilt rather than continuing an open-minded investigation. She also recognizes the tendency of police officers to believe that everyone is entitled to a defense except the suspects they arrest, who are by definition guilty scum undeserving of a presumption of innocence. Paula's obnoxious DCI, who succumbs to both those tendencies, is the novel's most realistic character.

Point of view rotates through the cast of characters, including various victims of the serial killer. One of the more prominent characters is Carol's former love interest, Tony Hill, a psychologist who doubles as a profiler. Like most fictional profilers, Tony has analytical powers that border on the psychic. He is also a good friend of Paula, who is tedious in her insistence that she is soooo very compassionate and cares soooo much about victims, unlike all the people who make her soooo angry because they have soooo little compassion. Both Tony and Paula are obnoxiously self-aggrandizing.

Carol's personality is similar to Paula's except that she's even more ridiculously judgmental. Carol is tedious in her insistence that the police are always pure of heart and that criminals are always monsters. That's bad enough, but she's just as harsh when it comes to judging her friends. Sometimes there's value in making a protagonist disagreeable, but I found little value in reading about Carol, in part because much of her anger seems artificial, a contrivance that allows Carol to make deep and meaningful adjustments in her thinking before the novel is over, leaving her fans smiling because Carol once again becomes the justice-craving person her fans want her to be. It's just too obvious to be compelling drama, and in any event, she's still a shallow binary thinker at the novel's end.

McDermid's bad guys are consistent with Carol's binary view of the world. There is no nuance in McDermid's cartoonish depiction of purely evil villains. Her descriptions of the serial killer's formative years are both unimaginative and unconvincing.

Characters frequently interrupt the plot to talk about their failed romances or their relationship anxiety or to "listen to each other's pain." They're so busy being a support group for each other that it's amazing they have time to do any police work. The conversations are a dull drag on the novel's momentum.

The plot hinges on too many unlikely coincidences. Coincidences happen all the time so I'm willing to give writers the benefit of their use, but when they start to pile up, the plot loses its credibility. The ending is much too tidy, and the novel loses credibility points there, as well. Still, the story moves quickly and McDermid's unblemished prose style is easy to read. The novel held my attention despite its unlikable characters and unconvincing plot. Series fans will no doubt like Cross and Burn more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS