"The thrilling latest in "queen of crime" (CrimeReads) Val McDermid's masterful detective series, Silent Bones finds DCI Karen Pirie and her team investigating the murder of a journalist paved under a motorway-but was it his work or his private life that put him there? Scotland, 2025. When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a motorway, it dislodges more than mud and asphalt-it reveals a skeleton, concealed when the road was built eleven years prior. Sam Nimmo, an investigative journalist who'd been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, had become the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. Now he's reappeared, buried under the motorway. It's the perfect cold case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit. But when an allegation of murder surfaces over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager, it unearths a series of interlinked puzzles that will test Karen and her team unlike ever before. A darkly propulsive thriller of secrets hidden at the core of a Scottish Highlands town, Silent Bones reaffirms Val McDermid as a crime writer of inimitable power"-- Provided by publisher.