After having a rather "heavy" night, Alex Gilby and his three best friends stumble home in the early hours of the morning. After a heavy dumping of snow, they decide that they will cut through the local cemetery to get back to their halls quicker. After a little horsing around from the group they stumble (literally!) onto the local barmaid Rosie Duff, who has been beaten, raped and stabbed, with the four boys being the only suspects. Twenty five years later the cold case team are reviewing all unsolved cases in the local area, with the murder of Rosie Duff being top of the list, though after the seemingly accidental death of one ...  Read the complete review

Following the publication of the tremendous “The Mermaids Singing” I devoured with relish everything that Val McDermid wrote and it was having enjoyed her books that I became an avid fan of crime fiction so much so that I had found other authors I liked much better by the time “The Distant Echo” was published. Over Christmas, though, I found a copy belonging to my mother and set off to find out what I’d been missing. “The Distant Echo” starts like all good thrillers – with the discovery of a body. In this case it’s the late 1970s and it’s the body of a young barmaid that has been found by four students coming home drunk from a party. In the absence of any ...  Read the complete review