Val McDermid: Silent Bones (USA 2025)

From the Publisher:
The new installment in the "relentlessly engrossing series" (Wall Street Journal) finds Karen Pirie and her team investigating the murder of a journalist paved under a motorway -- but was it his work or his private life that put him there?

Scotland, 2025. When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a motorway, it dislodges more than mud and asphalt - it reveals a skeleton, concealed when the road was built eleven years prior.

Sam Nimmo, an investigative journalist who'd been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, had become the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. Now he's reappeared, buried under the motorway. It's the perfect cold case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit. What was Nimmo investigating that was worth killing over? Or was it revenge for murdering his girlfriend? Meanwhile, an allegation of murder has surfaced over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager. It may have links to another accident on a remote Highland road. It's a series of puzzles that tests Karen and her team to their limits. And possibly beyond...

A darkly propulsive thriller of secrets hidden at the core of a Scottish Highlands town, Silent Bones reaffirms Val McDermid as a crime writer of inimitable power.

Val McDermid: Silent Bones. Atlantic Crime, ISBN: 9780802164391 (December, 2025), 432 p., $28.00, eBook $28.00.

Val McDermid: Silent Bones (UK 2025)

From the Publisher:
THE MASTERFUL NEW THRILLER IN THE KAREN PIRIE SERIES, NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES
The truth is buried just beneath the surface...
When torrential rain causes a landslide on a motorway in Scotland, it reveals a crime scene: someone hid a body in the tarmac eleven years before. Journalist Sam Nimmo had been the prime suspect in the murder of his fiancée when he disappeared, and now DCI Karen Pirie and her Historic Cases Unit must find out who buried him, and why.

Meanwhile in Edinburgh, new evidence reopens a closed case and the accidental death of a hotel manager starts to look like murder. But what did Tom Jamieson's book club have to do with his demise - and what will they do to keep their secrets?

Karen and her team begin to untangle a web of lies, one which connects their murder cases with Scotland's rich and powerful. They will be tested to their limits - and possibly beyond...

Val McDermid: Silent Bones. A Karen Pirie Thriller. Sphere, ISBN: 9781408734025 (October, 2025), 432 p., £22.00, eBook £12.99.