OPINION:
THE SKELETON ROAD
By Val McDermid
Grove Atlantic, $25, 416 pages
A tragedy embedded in a love story is vividly relived in the setting of the brutal Balkan wars in this gripping and expertly plotted thriller.
Val McDermid, a veteran crime writer, demonstrates just how good she is as she guides readers on a grim trail beginning with a skeleton in an ancient Edinburgh building. Its discovery proves to be a link to the murders and massacres that tortured the Balkans in the 1990s. Ironically, the British eccentricity of free-climbing the outside of buildings becomes part of the case, which becomes the responsibility of Karen Pirie, a veteran cold case detective who has the task of identifying the corpse in a pinnacle of a Gothic building. The resolution of that grisly problem is worse than anything she can imagine.
The case is made more complicated by its fascinating cast of characters. There is Professor Maggie Blake of Edinburgh University, haunted by her ties to the Balkans and her grim memories of Dubrovnik. She still mourns a man who disappeared eight years earlier and who was the love of her life. “Everything talks if you know how to listen” he had told her in response to her anguished attempts to get at the truth about his life in the Balkans, where she suspects he had another family. Of course he had, and of course they are dead. Ms. McDermid pulls no literary punches when she has to deal with death. And on a less grim note, there is Alan Macanespie, otherwise dubbed “the ginger pig” an investigator at the International Criminal Tribunal for a past Yugoslavia. He is struggling with a new boss, aptly named Cagney, who prides himself on the elegance of his suits and his determination that his staff will work harder on unsolved cold cases, like that in the Edinburgh pinnacle.
The mystery corpse turns out to be Yugoslav Gen. Dematrov Petrovic, a legendary figure in the Balkans and a central figure in the violence in which children were slaughtered and a church full of wedding guests were gunned down in revenge. When Petrovic is identified, the situation becomes more agonizing for Maggie Blake, who ultimately is faced with the fact that it was he who led the attack on a church to avenge a killing in which his own children were shot. She seeks and obtains much comfort from Tessa Minogue, a raven-haired bisexual lawyer who “knew more about the dark places than anyone else.”
A strange and rather sad friendship develops between the professor and Karen Pirie who is happily involved with Detective Inspector Phil Paharka in a relationship in which their affection for each other complements their investigative work. The two women walk together toward a poignant little meadow where a circle of white wooden crosses surrounds a stone plinth showing photographs of village children shot down by soldiers. It is a prologue to the killings in a nearby church and also a memorial to the general’s two sons.
Ms. McDermid draws a skillful parallel between the problems of conflicting police inquiries and what lies beyond the secrets of both Maggie Blake and Tessa Minogue. Yet it is Karen Pirie whose staunch detective work wrings from a priest the horror of the battles in the Balkans between Croats and Serbs, and the chilling role played by the general who was once a hero. She moves to a quietly spectacular denouement that hinges on a significant difference in a nickname that turns up on a list which bears the truth. That is when it becomes clear that certain revenge killings may be resolved in terms of who did it, but they may never satisfy the demands of law enforcement. It is also a case where fulfillment of justice is forever at question. And for Karen Pirie, there is yet another unexpected personal tragedy that transcends her work.
• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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