The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid - Review

As you may remember, my mother and I are making our way through the Karen Pirie series of books. I've been buying them on eBay for not a lot of money and reading them when I fancy them and passing them on to my mum. This is the third one in the series; we've now read the first, second, and fourth. There's a massive thing that has happened in the fourth book so I knew it was coming in this book and it was really sad and shocking, but it's not a main focus of the book, which I was glad about. I do wish I had read them in order but..... it doesn't really matter. 

Karen is called to a skeleton found in a remote part on a building in Edinburgh that is about to be demolished. Tests show that the man was killed by a bullet, and that he died approximately eight years ago. Tests on his teeth show that he had work done in Eastern Europe, so Karen starts looking in that direction for someone missing for eight years. Maggie is a professor in Oxford who spent time in Dubrovnik when there was a war going on there in the early 90s; she started to see a man called Dimitrar who was a general in the Croatian army. After the war the two moved back to Oxford, where she lectures in geopolitics. He went missing eight years ago (in the early noughties). Maggie always thought that he went back to an unknown first family in Croatia. Her friend Tessa, though, thinks that he has gone on a vigilante killing spree across Europe. 

Because, there is a tribunal occurring in The Hague for people who committed war crimes in the Balkans, but for a few people, before they could be brought to justice, they were killed by an unknown assailant. The tribunal is winding up, but there's a new boss who wants to make his presence felt and go out in a blaze of glory. So he puts the wind up two men, Macanespie and Proctor, and urges them to find the leak from within their own office or he will fire them both and they'll both have terrible ends to their careers. The two men are lawyers, and they are both kind of sailing along in life, but they get galvanised by this challenge and they end up on the same path as Karen. 

Maggie is also starting to write her memoirs from the time. As I was only young when this war was happening, I don't know too much about it so I was really having to think back and research what had happened there then. I found it really interesting though, and it informed me a lot about this period in history. I liked the book, although I found Maggie's memoir parts absolutely dreary and could cheerfully have lived without them. I liked that Karen had to go all over the place - much to the chagrin of her boss - and I liked what she discovered. I'm giving this four out of five.