One of the UK’s most accomplished and respected novelists, number one bestseller Val McDermid is coming to Penarth for a special evening to celebrate the release of her new Karen Pirie thriller, ‘Silent Bones’. With more than 19 million books sold worldwide and translations in over 40 languages, Val’s gripping and intelligent crime fiction has earned her a devoted global readership.

SILENT BONES:
When torrential rain causes a landslide on a motorway in Scotland, it reveals a crime scene: someone hid a body in the tarmac eleven years before. Journalist Sam Nimmo had been the prime suspect in the murder of his fiancée when he disappeared, and now DCI Karen Pirie and her Historic Cases Unit must find out who buried him, and why. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, new evidence reopens a closed case, and the accidental death of a hotel manager starts to look like murder.

But what did Tom Jamieson’s book club have to do with his demise – and what will they do to keep their secrets? Karen and her team begin to untangle a web of lies, one which connects their murder cases with Scotland’s rich and powerful. They will be tested to their limits – and possibly beyond…

Val McDermid has written five series of crime novels including eight featuring cold case detective Karen Pirie, with Karen now starring in a major ITV series, and eleven books with clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan which were adapted for television as ‘Wire in the Blood’, starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris. Val has also published several award-winning standalone novels, books of non-fiction, short story collections and a children’s picture book, ‘My Granny is a Pirate’. Her new Karen Pirie novel, ‘Silent Bones’, publishes in October 2025.

Val has won multiple international awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger, the LA Times Book of the Year Award and the Grand Prix des Romans D’Aventure. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has been a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, as well as chairing the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Val is also lead singer of the ‘Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers’, a rock band who have performed at Glastonbury. She lives in Edinburgh and the East Neuk of Fife.

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Thursday 23 October | 7.30 pm
The Paget Rooms, Penarth
Tickets: £28.00 includes a SIGNED hardback copy of Silent Bones (RRP: £22.00) / £12.00 Event Only / £5.00 Student Ticket / £5.00 Inclusive Ticket