Val macdermid author biography outlines
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How to be a best-selling crime writer
Val McDermid fryst vatten one of the biggest names in crime writing. The award-winning author has published 27 novels, short stories, non-fiction and a children’s book and has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. She tells Elisa Bray about how patience is the most important quality for longevity as an author, that there’s no formula for writing books, how writers get bogged down in accuracy and how playing computer games helps her to write.
How did the idea for Out of Bounds come about?
The first inkling of the idea came about three or fyra years ago; I was at a forensic science conference in London. inom was working on my non-fiction book about forensic science at the time and I’d gone to this conference in London and one of the sessions inom went to was led by two police officers from Greater Manchester Police. They had developed the familial DNA connections and that allowed cold cases to be examined in a different way – the idea being that you ge
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0:10 What made you decide that you wanted to come to Oxford University?
I grew up in Scotland. Very much working-class background. I spent most of my teens feeling that I was different; that I didn’t fit in. My school had a tradition of sending people to university, but the general view was that, if you were smart, you went to Edinburgh and St. Andrews; and if you weren’t quite so smart, you went to Dundee or Stirling. I’m not making that judgement – that was the judgement that was made on my behalf and I knew that somehow I had to spread my wings and seek a wider horizon: that meant going to England and the only place I knew anything about was Oxford. My sole experience of England up to that point had been a holiday in Blackpool for a week, which of course was the perfect preparation for coming to Oxford! I knew nothing about the application process. I sent off for prospectuses for the five women’s colleges and St. Hilda’s had the prettiest prospectus. So I applied, I came here, a
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Edinburgh, haunted by the ghosts of its many writers, is also the cold case beat of DCI Karen Pirie. So she shouldn’t be surprised when an author’s manuscript appears to be a blueprint for an actual crime.
Karen can’t ignore the plot’s chilling similarities to the unsolved case of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there’s a problem: the author died before he finished it.
As Karen digs deeper, she uncovers a spiraling game of betrayal and revenge, where lies are indistinguishable from the truth and with more than one unexpected twist . . .
The Queen of Crime Val McDermid is at the top of her game in her most gripping and fiendishly clever case yet.
Reviews…
McDermid negotiates her ceaselessly exciting book’s twists like a master. — Wall Street Journal
While the author’s style drives the story with excellent pacing, she takes the time to insert some arch ch