Category: Advance Review

Carol Jordan and Tony Hill have been through a lot in their eleven books together, and they each know that they wilt outside of each other's presence. In this latest instalment, Val McDermid finally allows Carol to process the extreme PTSD that has cropped up over two and a half decades worth of adventures and, as these things go, How The Dead Speak is a progress novel in what has become an increasingly stop-start pattern for these characters.

The cat and mouse genre requires delicate calibration to work. If a reader is going to have two opposing forces driving a book's narrative, it is often better to know one intimately and the other only in passing. Ran Will Come, the pseudonymous debut of screenwriter Thomas Holgate, gives near equal footing to its leads. It's a bold move, and it pays off in places and confounds in others.