A Darker Domain by Val McDermid - Review

As you may have seen previously, I started reading the Karen Pirie series of books by Val McDermid. I bought the first one and really enjoyed it, and then I passed it on to my mum who really enjoyed it too. So I made a list of all the Karen Pirie novels and picked up a couple of them on eBay. My mum and I both read the fourth one in the series, Out of Bounds back in September, but she got annoyed at reading them out of order. But I had already bought this one on Kindle for only about 99p, so I told my mother to either do the same or go to the library. Or buy it herself, I guess! Don't complain at me about it! 

Anyway I had this on Kindle so I went to it and I liked it. There are two strands to the story and it isn't clear to begin with how the two will match up, but I knew they would. 

In the first strand, a man is reported missing, only he went missing in late 1984 and by this time it's over twenty years later (the book was published in 2008, and set I think in 2007). He was a striking miner called Mick, living in a small pit village. He had a wife and child. It was believed that he went to Nottingham to work, to become a scab and betray the strike. Five men from the area also did this on the same night, so his wife and child believed he had gone there. They became pariahs in the village and haven't really had an easy time of it. Now, Michelle's child is seriously ill and his only hope of survival is to find a donor. Hence why Michelle is looking for her dad. But she can't find him and so reports him missing. Karen takes the report and although she's supposed to be looking at a different case, she is intrigued by this one and starts to look into what might have happened to Mick that night in December 1984. 

Meanwhile, a journalist called Bel is on holiday in Tuscany with some friends. She goes for a run one morning and goes into an abandoned and delapidated villa. There is a large blood stain on the floor in the kitchen. And then she finds a silk screen print of a poster with marionettes on it. She recognises it as a poster that was used in a ransom note in 1985. The daughter of local millionaire Brodie was kidnapped, alongside her baby son. Brodie and his wife arranged to meet her and the kidnappers and hand over the ransom, but it went wrong and Catriona ended up dead and her child Adam was never seen again. The poster being in the villa would link the people who had been squatting there to the kidnapping, but who were they? Bel approaches Brodie, hoping to be able to make a lot of money off the story. They try to keep the police out of it but Karen gets called anyway. But Brodie is used to being able to bend the police to his will, and he isn't forthcoming with what happened in 1985. 

I did really like the story and I felt like it came together really well. But I did think there were a few too many characters - many of whom were also known by aliases, which ended up confusing. I wish a few people could have been cut out and then it would have flowed better for me. It was hard to keep everyone straight in my head. 

But I thought this was a good second book in the series and I'm giving it four out of five.