The Distant Echo
By Val McDermid
HarperCollins, 400pp, $29.95
I am used to the Val McDermid novels featuring her private detective, Kate Brannigan. They are feisty, fast, intricate and sharp. The Distant Echo is not fast. It is a slowly evolving, spinechilling account of a murder that has far-reaching implications.
In 1978, four drunk students from Scotland's St Andrews University stumble upon Rosie the barmaid, half buried in snow, on their way home from a party. Rosie is dying. She has been raped and stabbed. Mondo, Weird, Ziggy and Alex make such beautiful suspects that it is not surprising the police find their story hard to believe. They have blood on their clothes, are out late in bad weather and are hiding something.
If one of the students isn't the murderer, then who is? Are we to look more closely at the murdered girl's thuggish brothers, who are convinced one of the students did it? Did Rosie have secrets that might have killed her?
The scene moves to the present. The students are successful professionals. Ziggy lives in Seattle with his male lover. Alex has married Mondo's sister, who is expecting their child. Weird has become a TV evangelist. They have almost forgotten about Rosie's murder until someone kills Ziggy and everything crashes down on them.
The story moves along like a perfectly poised globe that keeps spinning, however heavy it is. It never becomes melodramatic, although it can be unbearably tense.
The Scottish setting is beautifully rendered, from the descriptions of different types of snow and the effects of cold to the nuances of dialect between the characters.
To some extent a fable of original sin, the book traces how one action - the murder - echoes through the lives of everyone touched by it until it reaches a frightful but satisfactory conclusion.
I have read many detective stories and can usually deduce the structure, and hence the identity of the murderer, from the end of the third or fourth chapter. I couldn't do so here, and not because I wasn't given all the information I needed. On a second read (which I recommend) to find out how I was so fooled, I discovered that the author had planted a certain effect just when I might have noted a salient fact. But I'll let you analyse that one yourself.
This is a good book for a cold, rainy day when you have a streaming cold. By page 10, you will have forgotten all about it.
Kerry Greenwood's latest book is The Castlemaine Murders, published by Allen & Unwin.