I listened to all of the Ann Cleeves Vera, Shetland and Two Rivers novels and then moved to the Karen Pirie series by Val McDermid. Some themes, like fatphobia re: the main character are similar and for both Vera and the first book barely mentioned the detective until most of the book was over and they solved the case. The authors must be of the same generation which might explain some of it. Life must have been brutal for them, they are both super focused on appearances in a way I don’t see in mysteries often.

I wonder about both series if they had written the first book in the series as a on-off and then was asked years later to expand it into full series and make them more of a main character. Hoopla has both of these women’s series as audiobooks–some of the books aren’t readily available at libraries here. I did get an Audible trial to get this book, Hoopla has the rest but not this one–maybe too new? The library said it wasn’t available to order for some months.

Past Lying is the latest Karen Pirie, picking up right after the last book where there was some rumblings about employees getting sick in Italy. The early Covid setting felt pretty spot-on four years later.

It was interesting to have a mystery being solved during early lockdowns when no one knew what was going on and they weren’t even allowed in the office. In this case, an archivist gets in touch with Pirie’s colleague the Mint about a possible mystery. Pirie is bored and bunking with a new coworker in her absent boyfriend’s flat and ready to look into it. The mystery was fun but I didn’t feel like the book was a meticulously planned as some of her earlier books in the series.

I was confused by the dropping of the epilepsy clue. That was what caught the archivist’s eye initially—the apparent coincidence of a real-life missing woman and a story of a murdered woman having the same specific and unusual type of epilepsy in an unpublished manuscript donated to the archives —and spurred them to contact the Mint. They explained what the type of epilepsy was like in a lot of detail but then it didn’t show up in the manuscript or elsewhere in any of the stories that were evidence. What happened there?

It would have been nice to have a bit about the person who brought them the case in the epilogue. That was some find! I didn’t quite get the point of writing a mystery story to frame someone apparently after their natural death knowing the work was donated to archives. Did they want someone to investigate? Did they think it wouldn’t be discovered for decades? It seems like a roundabout way to give an alibi when there was no proof any crime has been committed at all. They all would have gotten away with murder. No one was asking questions, there was no body. There was no connection between the victim and any of the people involved (innocent or not) until there was a huge amount of digging done by some bored detectives who were able to get people on the phone and talking because they were all stuck at home and also bored during early lock down.

It was a fun book and idea in general though, I enjoyed it and the mystery in a mystery is always entertaining.