Hostage to Murder by
Val McDermid
pbk out November 03
(HarperCollins)
at £6.99
This is another in Val McDermid's Lindsay Gordon series, the heroine being
a Scots journalist who in this book has returned to Glasgow after years in
California, as her lover Sophie has been appointed as Professor of Obstetrics
in Glasgow University. Lindsay is not too happy about this, as she is left at a
loose end, her previous contacts in journalism in Scotland having become
rusty. Another more acute cause for her gloom is that Sophie announces that
she wants to have a baby - bad news for Lindsay, who even gets blackmailed
into inseminating her lover with a syringe, the contents being provided by a
gay friend in the spare bedroom.
Fortuitously, she sprains her ankle and is rescued by young Rory McLaren,
who invites her to team up in her own investigative journalism business.
Across the city, Bernie Dooley, an Ulster émigré, is being stalked by the
thugs of an IRA boss in Belfast and almost simultaneously, her young son is
abducted by her former husband, an Italian diplomat.
Lindsay and Rory get in on the act and chase off to St Petersburg, where the
boy has been taken. They re-abduct him and smuggle him back on a yacht,
skippered by Lindsay's fisherman father. Things progress and eventually
there is a Hamlet-like ending.
I have to say that for me, this was not one of Val McDermid's best, in that
the plot seemed too contrived and the Russian episode seemed a bit of an
irrelevance, perhaps included because a trip the author made there was too
good to be wasted. As a crime novel, it was a bit thin, most of the book
being concerned with the emotional and physical turmoil of the eternal
triangle that developed between Sophie, Rory and Lindsay.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Hostage to Murder by
Val McDermid
