Book details

Book description

First in the popular series featuring Lindsay Gordon, a self-proclaimed 'cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist' with a penchant for hanging around police interrogation rooms under suspicion of some crime or other.

Freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon is strapped for cash. Why else would she agree to cover a fund-raising gala at a girls' public school? But when the star attraction is found garrotted with her own cello string minutes before she is due on stage, Lindsay finds herself investigating a vicious murder.

Who would have wanted Lorna Smith Cooper dead? Who had the key to the locked room in which her body was found? And who could have slipped out of the hall at just the right time to commit this calculated and cold-blooded crime? 'Move over V. I. Warshawski' Options

'McDermid has created a complex and prickly detective. The relationship intertwines a realistic romance with a solid detective story.' Washington Times

'[She is] fresh and funny with a sparkling sense of time and place' Literary Review Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. She is now a full-time writer and divides her time between Cheshire and Northumberland.