I requested this book fron Netgalley as I have previously enjoyed many of the author’s books. But for some reason I have never come across this series.
I saw this as an audiobook from the library, so decided to listen to the story as I’m very partial to a scottish accent and I was entranced.
As book 5 in the series and not having read any previously, it was surprising easy to slip into the story line. For me it was a solid basic police procedural novel. DCI Karen Pirie is the lead in homicide cold cases and with a 25 year old mystery of a body found with some much older Indian motorbikes, she is thoughly tested.
There is enough back story provided so that your aware that Karen has has some recent tradgy in her life but also that station politics is rearing it’s ugly head. There are a number of other threads running through which tie in seamlessly to a satisfing conclusion.
This is one series that I can see translating well onto the screen.

Val McDermid's Karen Pirie novels are fast becoming my favourite series of hers. The cold case element is intriguing and the reader is secure in the knowledge that Val has done her research. I love to pick up the little techie details that help to solve the crime and am constantly in awe of the progress made in forensic anthropology.



So, in Broken Bones we are transported to the highlands of Scotland during WW2 where elite training camps were set up for reconnaissance and sabotage purposes. To find out more about these elite training camps click here . What I loved about Broken Bones was the two concurrent narratives - the one exploring Pirie's ongoing investigation and the one detailing the the series of events that lead to a body being discovered, buried, beside two vintage motorbikes. She paints a very realistic picture of the highlandsboth historically and contemporary.
Her plotting is flawless - never too much detail, never too little, but always with little tantlising titbits that eventually elicit an 'aw, so that's what happened.'

One of the things I enjoy most about this series though is Karen Pirie herself. Her personal journey has been challenging, poignant and sometimes downright brutal. In Broken Ground she has evolved yet again and is in a differetn place. It is this relatability that keep me hooked. Karen isn't just a great detective - we already knew that - her capacity to renew herself and open herself personally has been a delight to read.
Can't wait for the next Pirie novel.

I wait and wait for new books by certain authors, and Val McDermid is at the top of the list. I was thrilled when she added a new series about Karen Pirie in Scotland. This one is superb.

Karen is still grieving her late partner and lover Phil, but work is her salvation. This new mystery about two Indian motorcycles from WWII, a dead body buried with the motorcycles, and one more case for the Historical Case Unit team makes for quite a complicated problem for Karen and her team of players. A new detective is added to the team by her nemesis and boss, who is still trying to get rid of her.

A couple from London come to a rural area near Edinburgh to find the treasure left by the woman's grandfather to her in the form of a map where the two motorcycles were buried at the end of WWII. But the topography has changed a lot since the end of WWII nearly 60 years ago... And so it begins.

You will love this new story by McDermid. Don't miss it.

In Val McDermid's Broken Ground (Atlantic Monthly Press 2018), in the Karen Pirie series, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit is chasing down a decades-old sex crime murder when she gets called to help with a body found in the grave of a 1944 motorcycle--but the body was buried well after the motorcycle. How it got there takes most of the book to figure out but Pirie does what she always does--starts at the beginning, one brilliant step at a time. As if this isn't enough for her three-person squad, she becomes involved in a double murder.

Karen Pirie is a fascinating character. She is a woman’s woman.

"She’d never fitted his image of what a woman should be –obsequious, obedient and ornamental."
She is intelligent and quick thinking, logical and rational, and comfortable leading her squad, being a hard-a** female, and standing up for right when no one else will. When her soulmate died, she assumed she would never again find love and convinced herself she would be content to find justice for victims. But here, in the Scottish bogs (the setting of one of the murders), she surprises herself by feeling a flicker of interest--that is returned.

An integral part of the story is the growing animosity between Pirie and her boss, Ann Markie. It's not only Pirie's success that threatens her boss but her refusal to play the deference game.

"Ann Markie was devoted to the kind of justice that let her craft sound bites for the evening news."

Now, juggling three high-profile murder cases, her boss is annoyed to the point Pirie fears for her job.

I am addicted to Val McDermid's books because she has such a way with words. From her pen, the phrases are evocative, pithy, uniquely clever, and often very Scottish. See if you agree:

"...the cool night air wicked the sweat from the back of his neck."

"...tacked on at the back like a grudging afterthought"

"But I know one thing. You’ve left way too late to make a good first impression."

"An insult of a window looked out across an alley on to a blank wall."

Broken Ground is as much a procedural on police work and on how to run a squad in Scotland as it is a fast-moving, twist-filled murder-mystery. It is highly recommended for those who love police crime novels and murder mysteries.

--to be reviewed on my blog, WordDreams 11/30/18

Everyone deserves justice. DCI Karen Pirie heads up the HCU, her team deals with all the cold case. Karen believes that everyone deserves answers but her boss is making things very hard for her. She has just gotten a new team member that she didn't want and she doesn't trust him. The team has just gotten a new case that goes back to 1995 and she is determined to find the young man's killer even if it means her putting her career on the line. She is battling to find answers to a old case rape case and she has to find the proof that will see a woman pay for her crimes. She knows that she can trust her fellow team member Jason he has come a long way and he never gives up either. Can she bring all the clues together to solve these cases and keep her job? She isn't too sure about the man that wants to be part of her life in a way she is still grieving for her dead partner, is it time to move on? A really good read. Love Karen she never gives up and she deserves to be happy so hopefully she can be again. Jason grows on you. Her boss is a complete pain hopefully she gets what is coming to her. I was lucky enough to receive a copy via Netgalley and the publishing house in exchange for my honest review.

Thoroughly enjoyed this latest Val MCDermid novel. 1st I’ve read featuring DCI Karen Pirie however I’m now looking forward to catching up with the others in this series.
Good old fashioned policework, plenty of twists & turns with beautiful Scotland as the background.
Had me gripped for the outset.
4.5 stars

Another top notch story by Val McDermid.. This author is extremely accomplished and this well crafted police procedural is up to her usual very high standards.

As always, the storyline, characters and dialogue are superbly realised and this book is highly recommended, although the conclusion seemed a little peremptory.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Press for an e-galley of this novel.

This police procedural novel set in Scotland is the fifth in the Inspector Karen Pirie series. I have not read any of the series before now but had no problem picking up on the main characters and understanding where they stand in their personal and professional lives at the beginning of this story. I didn't think I was going to like this book very much but kept reading and found I was being drawn into sympathizing with Karen as she spends hours and hours walking around the city trying to fight the insomnia caused by the recent death of the love of her life. As the story unfolds Karen and the Historic Cases Unit find themselves involved in three separate crimes and Karen is locked in a formidable battle with her boss over control of the HCU. She thought having a woman as her new boss would be a positive situation but that is certainly turning out to be wrong.

The cases investigated in this novel are all completed in a satisfactory way even though I thought at one point the author might have tried to do too much in one book. I did enjoy this book, I think the characters are well developed and the unraveling of the mystery of the body found buried in the peat bog was especially interesting. I'm glad I decided to read this book and plan to read other novels written by Val McDermid.

I had so wanted this to be great but is was only ok. I like Karen Pirie and have read a few of these books in the past and thought them pretty good. I'm a died in the wool Val McDermid fan and always want them to be amazing and she usually delivers. This one wasn't my fave though, I loved the start, and thought the whole idea of burying motorcycles so that they could later be retrieved after the war and sold, was cool. Then they find a body buried with the bikes and Karen and her team enter to investigate this historic murder. Unfortunately Karen is grieving her partner, her boss hates her and is setting her up to fail. That isn't good but then Karen goes on dates with one of the suspects and generally behaves in a way that I found unrealistic and the story just plods along. We get bogged down in the drama between Karen and her boss, the spy who is infiltrating Karen's team and the detail of the investigation, so much detail, so slow to move along.

I got frustrated with Karen, need the story to get moving and just struggled through it. I was helped by a plane journey which meant I got stuck into it in the end but it seldom takes me so long to finish a book. I do however look forward to a new Val and hope for one that is a bit more exciting.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me access to this book.

I was not familiar with Val McDermid's books, but I enjoy a good mystery and Broken Ground sounded intriguing when it came available for review. I am glad I chose to read it; I have found a new mystery series to read. The characters are well-developed and interesting, especially Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie. I like that she is complex and somewhat flawed, confident and steadfast in some aspects, but uncertain in other areas. The central mystery is well-developed and intricate, with pieces slowly coming together. The author does a good job of alternating between past and present as needed, revealing just enough in the past to keep the story going without giving away too much too soon. I also liked that she did not make the characters, especially some of the minor characters, into stereotypes, which would have been easy to do.

The book is set in Scotland, with good use of Scottish words and phrases. As the author is Scottish, it should be expected that she would have a good grasp of her native tongue, but I have read enough books set in other countries to know that authors seeking to appeal to a mass market sometimes go overboard trying to make the book sound "authentic" or they use the local language only in a humorous manner. I was glad that this was not the case with Ms. McDermid's book.

This is apparently the fifth book in the DCI Pirie series. Having enjoyed this read, I will definitely have to go back and read the first four books in the series at some point.

I received a copy of the e-book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

Val McDermid’s thirty-second novel was my first, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I’ve read novels from successful authors before, at times with mixed results. “Broken Ground” exceeded all my expectations.

While others might write with the belief that their characters always will only work on one case at a time, Ms. McDermid deals in realities. This book keeps your attention, sliding from one case to the next and then back again with such ease that one can easily imagine how busy the detectives are and what it would feel like attempting to balance their work days.

What I enjoyed most was the author’s expertise at slowly dribbling out the clues, allowing us to see no further than the characters so we all discovered the guilty parties at the same time. This was accomplished through true police work, not the fast and furious action we see crammed into 46 minutes of visual exploits on a weekly police television program. While adrenaline junkies may not find this book to be their nirvana, it is refreshing to read a story that is down-to-earth and totally believable.

I also like the main character, Karen Pirie. She is not weighed down by either a medical issue nor a haunting event in her past that threatens to incapacitate her at any moment. Karen is a strong female lead, and Ms. McDermid makes sure this does not go to her head. She leads with confidence rather than sheer force of will, and this aspect alone encourages me to seek out the author’s previous books in this series.

Bottom line: Excellent book loaded with police procedural aspects, and a story that keeps you entertained without gun battles or car chases. Highly recommended. Five stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for an advance complimentary ebook.

Val McDermond I'd predictable - she ALWAYS writes tightly paced, intense stories.

Alice is not a silly, vapid heroine who needs to be pulled into solving the mystery.

I could not put this down, loved the characters, the police procedural and the intriguing cold case mystery.

In the 5th book in McDermid's Karen Pirie series, Pirie and her sidekick Jason Murray have to solve a baffling case when a pair of motorcycles buried after WWII are unearthed with an unexpected addition--a much more recently buried murder victim. Pirie and Murray have to identify the body and and figure out who might have wanted him dead. They are also facing challenges from within the administration when an officer is transferred into the Cold Case Unit. Something seems off about Gerry McCartney--has he been sent to spy on Pirie?

I tend to enjoy Scottish crime novels and Val McDermid can always be counted on to deliver a compelling story that nicely balances crime and the private lives of police. In this one, Karen Pirie may be on the brink of a new relationship but is her career in jeopardy?

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

This is the fifth of the Karen Pirie cold case novels. I enjoyed this book a lot. Karen has moved with Fife to Edinburgh. She is working on discovering the owner of a red car that was seen when a prostitute was picked up and beaten so badly she was unable to walk or talk. Then a new case about a body found in a peat bog is given to her by her friend River Wilde. Karen and Jason (the Mint) take on this case leaving McCartney (an officer forced on her by the boss, nicknamed The Dog Biscuit) to follow up on the red car. Interesting learning how a body buried in peat does not deteriorate as it would in soil. I felt that ending was rather short and rushed, but enjoyed the investigation and meeting new characters. I dislike reading a series out of order as things may have happened in previous books which are revealed in the new one. Such is the case with this one. Now I want to read the two in this series that I have missed.

This is the fifth book in the Karen Pirie Historic Cases Unit police procedural series by prolific writer, Val McDermid. I’ve read one prior novel in this series and really like the main character. She is strong, intelligent, vulnerable, but not overly flawed.

Karen is juggling three cases, two historic ones that are in her perview and a current one that she has insinuated herself into based on an overheard conversation. Although still mourning the death of her love, Phil, she meets a new interesting man and her new supervisor, seemingly out to get her, has planted a spy in Karen’s three person department.

The unfolding of the primary case is told through the revelation of evidence as well as flashbacks to both 1944 which set the scene for the crime and 1995 when the crime was committed. There were some unique aspects to the cases which made them interesting and the book held my attention throughout. I thought the resolution came quickly and the final disposition of the case could only be assumed. McDermid did lay some ground work for the next in the series and I look forward to it.

The Body In The Bog is a nicely alliterative strapline normally used to liven up reports of archaeologists discovering some centuries-old corpse in a watery peat grave. The deaths of these poor souls does not usually involve an investigation by the local police force, but when the preserved remains are wearing expensive trainers, it doesn’t take the tenant of 221B Baker Street to deduce that the chap was not executed as part of some arcane tribal ritual back in the tenth century.

A pair of hopefuls from England have traveled to the bleak Scottish moors of Wester Ross, armed with what they hope is a treasure map. They hope to uncover not a sturdy wooden chest bursting with pirate doubloons or King John’s lost gold, but treasure of a different sort – two mint condition vintage motor cycles, worth a fortune at 2018 prices. They disinter the motorcycles with the help of a friendly local crofter and his mini JCB, but their elation is soured by – yes, you’ve guessed – the aforementioned fellow and his 1995 Nike Air Max sportswear.

Motorcycles? Buried in a Scottish peat bog? Marked on a map? Has Val McDermid finally lost her marbles after years of inventing fiendish ways for people to die? Leaving no question unanswered, I have to say yes, yes, yes – and an emphatic NO! Breaking Ground is the fifth in McDermid’s DCI Karen Pirie series and is shot through with the author’s trademark brilliance. McDermid does complex, clever, conflicted women like no-one else, and Pirie – of Police Scotland’s Historic Crimes Unit - is a fine cop, scarred by personal tragedy, studiously unglamorous in looks and style, but with a fierce determination to seek justice for victims of crime, both living and dead. The police procedural aspect of the story is cleverly done, and provides the essential counterpont of rivalry, betrayal and bitterness which run beneath the main tune which is the public face of policing.

If music halls were still in vogue, McDermid would be the dextrous juggler, the jongleur who defies gravity by keeping several plot lines spinning in the air; spinning, but always under her control. There is the Nike bog body, a domestic spat which ends in savagery, a cold-case rape investigation which ends in a very contemporary tragedy, and an Assistant Chief Constable who is more concerned about her perfectly groomed press conferences that solving crime. They say that the moon has a dark side, and so does Edinburgh: McDermid takes us on a guided tour through its majestic architectural and natural scenery, but does not neglect to pull away the undertaker’s sheet to reveal the squalid back alleys and passageways which lurk behind the grand Georgian facades. We slip past the modest security and peep through a crack in the door at a meeting in one of the grander rooms of Bute House, the official residence of Scotland’s First Minister, even getting a glimpse of the good lady herself, although McDermid is far too discreet to reveal if she approves or disapproves of Ms Sturgeon.

Karen Pirie battles the metaphorical demons of her own personal history, while facing more literal malice in the person of a senior officer who is determined to bring her down. The death of her beloved partner Phil has bequeathed emotional turmoil, anger and longing. When she meets a potentially interesting man in the course of a murder investigation, she is conflicted. Is he lying to her? Is he just a glib charmer, ruggedly beautiful in his kilt, or is his interest in her – intentionally dowdy and brusquely professional as she is – genuine?

Val McDermid answers all these questions, and poses a few of her own, particularly about the state of modern Scotland and the role of cash-strapped police forces in a society which demands quick solutions, and to hell with integrity. Broken Ground is published by Little, Brown and is available in hardback and as a Kindle. Amazon says that it will be out in paperback early in 2019.

This is my first Val McDermid novel and wont be my last! I was apprehensive at first with this being the 5th book in the series, but it stood well on its own. It does connect with the previous books so i might recommend reading those first. The flash backs between past and present were done and well and I enjoyed getting to get that closer look to how certain things in the book came about. Overall I found the characters real and easy to connect with. The writing was imaginative and brilliant!

Broken Ground is the latest story about Detective Chief Inspector Karin Pirie by Val McDermid. Definitely a stand alone story, as I didn't realize it was part of a series until I was far into the book. Karin Pirie is an enjoyable character who the reader can relate to and enjoy following the bread crumbs as she does, to discover the culprit in cold cases. I'm looking forward to reading more in this series. I was given an early copy to review.

Absolutely enjoyed this book, I have read the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series but this is the first time I have read any of the Karen Pirie series. The storyline does tend to switch between past and present but as the storyline unravels you can start to get a sense of how an action in the past can impact so heavily in the present. Highly recommended