When a body is discovered in the remote depths of the Scottish Highlands, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie finds herself in the right place at the right time. Unearthed with someone's long-buried inheritance, the victim seems to belong to the distant past, until new evidence suggests otherwise and Karen is called in to unravel a case where nothing is as it seems. It's not long before an overheard conversation draws Karen into the heart of a different...

When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before. Finding the answer to the cold case should be straightforward. But it?s as twisted as the DNA helix itself.

"In the center of historic Edinburgh, builders are preparing to convert a disused Victorian Gothic building into luxury flats. They are understandably surprised to find skeletal remains hidden in a high pinnacle that hasn't been touched by maintenance for years. But who do the bones belong to, and how did they get there? Could the eccentric British pastime of free climbing the outside of buildings play a role? Enter cold case detective Karen Pirie,...

This "cunningly plotted" (New York Times) thriller is coming to Britbox this October!
Bestselling, award-winning author Val McDermid delivers her most stunning story yet in The Distant Echo—an intricate, thought-provoking tale of murder and revenge.
Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow blankets St. Andrews School. Student Alex Gilbery and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when

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"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...

Psychological profiler Tony Hill and ex-detective Carol Jordan are grappling with the consequences of their actions and the legacy of abuse in the Catholic Church. Construction is halted on the redevelopment of an orphanage after dozens of skeletons are found buried on the grounds dating from between twenty and forty years ago. Then a different set of skeletons are discovered in a far corner, young men from as recently as ten years ago. Meanwhile,...