In 1944, as World War II is drawing to a close, two men are ordered to destroy army surplus. This includes two motorcycles, shiny and brand-new. The men can’t bring themselves to destroy them, so instead they bury the bikes deep in peat-ground of the Scottish highlands. Years later, the granddaughter of one of the men figures out the location of the bikes and, with the help of a local, they decide to dig them up. They find more than they bargained for; a corpse has been interred along with the bikes.
Detective Karen Pirie works for the Scottish police Historic Crimes Unit. Not the flashiest of departments, but she likes bringing closure to victims of crimes committed long ago. When the body is discovered, she is called out to investigate where it came from and who put it there.
Broken Ground is the fifth book in the Karen Pirie series – my library has the annoying habit of carrying the more recent titles, but not the older ones in series – and I haven’t read the preceding four, so reading this one I occasionally felt like I was missing a bit of background. Karen herself is likeable enough; smart, but not too smart, generally aware of her own flaws, competent and driven but not to the point where work is her entire personality.
Other parts of the book, I was less fond of. McDermid is a competent writer, so I was surprised how many clichés she dragged out here. Karen’s superior is hell-bent on bringing her down for entirely predictable reasons; it’s a tale as old as time, and the way the woman talks to her subordinates is straight out of the book of Big Bad Cop Show Clichés. The same goes for Gerry, a new addition to the team. There’s also a romantic subplot that has Karen – otherwise fairly down to earth – make a big deal out of something that just… Isn’t. She blows a gasket over a nice gesture, essentially. The love interest, by the way, is a kilt-wearing highlander. He’s Jamie Fraser, basically, and not in a good way. I also didn’t particularly enjoy how Karen – on purpose or accidentally – makes herself the centre of everything going on in the book.
The central crime itself seems rather ludicrous, with too many unlikely events taking place to seem plausible, but I will admit it kept me guessing for a while. Rather than a classic Whodunnit, the book shows how Karen slowly and steadily works at following leads until she ends up at the right person; it’s hardly Poirot, gathering everyone in the library to tell them he deduced it was the butler from this one tiny clue. Rather, it’s solid policework, and I can appreciate that.
There’s another subplot about a domestic violence case that feels weirdly crammed in, as if the author felt the book needed a second plot. It’s complicated enough that it would probably have been best served as a separate book, though I get why having a secondary story makes sense for the narrative. I did like the somewhat open ending of the novel.
All in all, while there were things I didn’t like about this book, but it has its qualities.