covid

Val McDermid: Past Lying

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Karen Pirie #7

This is the series I think of as Val McDermid’s “gentler” series.  Unlike the gruesomeness of the Tony Hill books, these books are more cerebral.  Cerebral in an un-putdownable way. Karen Pirie heads up Edinburgh’s cold case squad – called in Scotland the HCU or Historical Cases Unit.  At the close of the last book, Karen and her squad mate, Daisy, had agreed to go into lockdown together as COVID was just taking its hold on the world.  At that moment, it seemed like lockdown would be a few short weeks, but as this novel opens COVID is in full swing. read more

Katherine Hall Page: The Body in the Web

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Faith Fairchild #26

Katherine Hall Page has written the first mystery – that I have read – that has fully fleshed out the pandemic. How it hit, how weird it was, how it affected schools, including colleges, jobs, and all the ways people congregate.

Faith Fairchild is a minister’s wife, a parent of a college student and a high school senior, and the owner of a catering company. Her sister is a financial lawyer on Wall Street, and she receives early information about the forthcoming pandemic. She contacts Faith and tells her all the things she needs to stock up on, as well as telling her that Faith’s son would be sent home from college soon. read more

Elly Griffiths: The Locked Room

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I have devoured every word of the Ruth Galloway series, and each time I pick one up, I am reminded again what wonderful, pure reads these books are.  From the second you crack open the first page to the moment you close the cover at the end, Griffiths as a storyteller holds her reader completely in her grasp.  Under her spell.  Bewitched. This book is no different, though it was, to me, a bit more intense and a bit more grim as she confronts covid front and center.

It is historically significant to have lived through a pandemic – and we seem to be emerging from it at last – but as you live through something historically significant, you have no actual perspective.  A start to gaining some perspective is to read a thoughtful examination of just what happened, which Griffiths provides her reader. As the book opens, Ruth is teaching an archeology class and she gets a call that there’s body on a construction site.  She takes the class along as a learning experience, event letting the students bag up the bones for transportation at the end.  The students are curious to discover if the body comes from a plague pit, a foreshadowing of what’s to come. read more