A Place of Execution

⚖The case for it

A Derbyshire village closes ranks around a vanished girl in the winter of 1963, and a young detective on his first big case learns how a community's silence can shield the guilty. The procedural half here is as good as the form gets, patient and cold and exact, the moor and the dread worked right into your skin. The modern frame, journalist Catherine Heathcote reopening the case decades later, moves slower and asks your patience. Give it. McDermid never cheats the reader, and the moral weight these people carry lands harder than any chase scene. Few crime writers build and hold a story this completely.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Everything depends on a single late reveal, and on whether you accept that an entire village, plus the narrative itself, kept it from you for the length of the book. The 1963 procedural is superb; the modern frame around journalist Catherine Heathcote is thin by comparison, there mostly to spring the trap.

— the honest librarian