Set in Glasgow in January...er...1979, Allie Burns is a relatively new young journalist on a Scottish tabloid paper. A colleague brings her in on an investigative story which exposes them both to risk, and then Allie immediately sniffs out another major scoop involving dangerous undercover work and a serious risk of reprisal.
Allie is an engaging protagonist. She is perhaps a little implausibly 21st Century in her standing up to the laddish culture in the male-dominated newsroom of boozing, misogyny and sexism, but that culture is very well drawn and rings true to my memory of those times. Gay issues play an important role in the story and it is shocking to be reminded that as late as 1979 homosexual activity was still illegal in Scotland and that one could be prosecuted for it. (I looked it up and this didn’t change until 1981 which this English reader, who had plenty of gay friends at the time, found horrifying.) The atmosphere of the time is generally well evoked, but I did feel that Val McDermid was straining at it a bit. She has plainly done plenty of research, but it was rather too near the surface much of the time; people seemed to do a lot of explaining to each other what it was like in 1979, even though they were living in it, for example, and (with the exception of one Pink Floyd album) everyone was listening only to music and reading only books from that exact moment...and so on. I also thought that the plot plodded just a little, with rather too much sightly laboured exposition.
I expected a little better from such an experienced and rightly respected author. This was still a perfectly decent four-star read for me and I will certainly try the next in the series, but I hope that Val McDermid will be able to relax into the story and the period rather more and allow them to develop more naturally.
(My thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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