Out of Bounds by Val McDermid was first published in 2016 and it’s the fourth book in the Karen Pirie series. I can’t say too much about the book as I know that some blogpals have begun to read the series and I don’t want to spoil anything for them.

Briefly, Karen Pirie is of course head of the Cold Cases at Police Scotland. When a young joy rider crashes a car and ends up in a coma his DNA is routinely taken and tested, with the result that a close family connection of his had commited a murder 22 years earlier, but had never been tracked down.

In theory it should be an easy job to find the murderer – but of course nothing is as simple as Karen hopes.

The setting is mainly Edinburgh,  but it does move to London for a short time. I’ll continue with this series although I enjoyed the first two books of the series most, that might be because the settings were so close to what is now home for me, that’s very parochial of me I know but it’s always a plus if you can literally see the streets that you’re reading about.