Val McDermid recommendations please

A Place of Execution is one of the best crime novels I’ve ever read and may be in my top 10 favourite books of all time. The only other of hers I’ve read is Wire in the Blood, which contained a scene so gruesome that it still haunts me years later. It is well written though, so if you like that kind of thing, go for it!

@elkiedee which one of the Jordan/Hill ones were you not keen on?

I'm working my way through them atm and enjoy them but have mixed feeling about many aspects.

Val McDermid is an author I've always meant to read as she comes across so well as a talking head on book programmes.

Until I realised that I had actually read one of her books, many, many times to the DC as she's the author of My Granny is a Pirate

Neither the Lindsay Gordon or Kate Brannigan series are police procedurals or aiming to be. The central series characters aren't police detectives. One is an investigative journalist, the other is a private investigator.

IMO the Lindsay Gordon and Kate Brannigans are dire.
If I'd read them first I'd never have touched any of her others. They're almost like parodies of police procedurals.

A Place of Execution (standalone loosely based on the Moors Murders) is my favourite but I like the Tony Hill ones too. (never quite forgiven ITV for casting Hermione Norris as Carole Jordan though!)

"as they are" sorry autocorrect..

I like the Kate Brannigan ones asthma are a bit less gory than the rest, standalone The Grave Tattoo is also good.

I really like the Kate Brannigan books. They’re funny and have the advantage of being shorter than some of her later stuff.

I have read all her books, I think, or most of them. I agree to start with Karen Pirie. The Wire in the Blood series are quite disturbing, though I used to love them!

Yes, I think the Karen Pirie books are a good place to start. I set the info out like that because I wasn't sure from the original post what you were looking for. I actually quite like them all in their way.

I like the Karen Pirie ones the best.

The Carol Jordan/Tony Hill books are very well written but also very gruesome, and [spoiler?] nasty things happen to regular characters you've already got to know.

The Lindsay Gordon ones are definitely dated, and as her first series the writing is not quite up there imo. A bit unsubtle.

I really liked A Place of Execution but haven't read the other standalones.

Val McDermid has written a number of crime fiction series in quite different styles, some standalone novels and non fiction.

Her series characters

Lindsay Gordon is a Scottish lesbian journalist who keeps finding herself caught up in murder investigations. These were first published by the Women's Press in the 1980s, apart from the last one which she wrote some years later after acquiring bestseller status. I really enjoyed them but they are of their time. Titles include Common Murder and Union Jack (#3). 5 books.

Kate Brannigan, is a private investigator working in South Manchester. There are 6 books about her. I like these for the settings, as I come from Leeds and lived in south Manchester as a student.

Carol Jordan and Tony Hill - police officer and psychological investigator. Serial killers. It took me years to try the first one as I wasn't at all sure about this change in direction, but I do like this series very much, though there was one that I found disappointing. This together with the standalone A Place of Execution were breakthroughs for her. Started in late 90s and now 11 books in series and ongoing.

Karen Pirie is a Scottish police detective. She first appears in The Distant Echo mainly set in the late 70s, though I think she's in the storyline set later - it's a cold case story. But I don't see The Distant Echo as really the start of the series because she's a character, it's not really focused on the police detective character/investigation as the 5 or 6 books that feature her as a central character properly are.

I really like her non fiction book A Suitable Job for a Woman about real female PIs and what they do in real life rather than in ficiton. bit I'm not sure whether it's in print.