Union Jack (Lindsay Gordon Crime Series) - Softcover

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. She is now a full-time writer and divides her time between Cheshire and Northumberland.

Lindsay Gordon (Report for Murder, 1998, etc.), a Scottish teacher of journalism now based in California, has returned to Sheffield, England, to attend a journalists conference concerned mostly with the business of unions. There's much to remind Lindsay of a conference in Blackpool nine years beforesoon after the death from cancer of her lover Frances Collier. At that meeting Lindsay's friend and fellow editor Ian Ross had died in an auto accident soon after his breakup with longtime mistress Laura Craig, who's in attendance at Sheffield nowchic and sharp-tongued as ever. Lindsay's more at ease after the arrival of Dr. Sophie Harley, her latest lover, who's to give a lecture. The entire assemblage is intrigued by the appearance every night of a gossipy newsletter that, among other things, accuses Laura of being a spy for anti-union forces and accuses Tom (Union) Jack, General Secretary of the Amalgated Union of Media Workers, of skimming union funds. All this takes a backseat when Lindsay, returning to her room one night, discovers her window smashed and the body of Tom Jack on the ground ten floors below. With Lindsay a prime suspect but not yet charged, Lindsay and Sophie proceed to play detective, using endless questions, hypnosis, break-ins, the study of secret documents, etc. Their mostly dull, repetitive moves do finally pin down the killer and even uncover the author of the infamous newsletter. Long on talk, short on suspense: McDermids fuzzy plot and the uninspired characters fall far short of some of her previous efforts. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.