Blue Genes

by Val McDermid Narrated by Chloe Massey

Overview

Kate Brannigan is having a bad weekend, her boyfriend's death notice is in the newspaper, her plans to capture a team of heartless fraudsters are in disarray, and a Celtic neo-punk band want her to rescue them from saboteurs. As if that isn't enough, Kate's business partner wants her to buy him out so he can emigrate to Australia, and Private Eyes with principles never have that kind of cash. Kate can't even cry on her best friend's shoulder, for Alexis has worries of her own. Confronting betrayal and greed, Kate fights to save her livelihood and her life.

Editorial Reviews

Maxim Jakubowski

Superior storytelling and realistic characterization.
—Time Out

Mike Ripley

Top marks for pace and plot.
—Daily Telegraph- London

Frances Hegarty

So smooth you can almost kid yourself you haven't been sitting on the edge of your seat throughout.
—Mail on Sunday- London

Marcel Berlins

Zippy action, a well-crafted plot and some refreshingly gritty northern truths.
—The Times- London

Literary Review London

Busy, invigorating, high in street and every other kind of cred.

Kirkus Reviews

Kate Brannigan's partner-in-crime-solving, Bill Mortensen, has been snared by a marriage-minded Australian siren and wants to sell his share of their inquiry agency to Kate. But she can't afford it—and besides, there's no way to tell what the partnership will be worth if wisecracking Kate (Clean Break, 1995, etc.) even survives the rash of cases that await her. There's an unscrupulous pair of headstone sellers who prey on the recently bereaved, and the punk band (scruffy buddies of Kate's rock-journalist lover Richard Barclay) whose shot at basking in the bright lights of Manchester is getting sabotaged by a bunch of well-connected heavies. And then there's the murder of Dr. Sarah Blackstone, a gynecologist who promised her practice—lesbians who wanted children of their own—that she could help them conceive without involving any men. Now Blackstone's patients, desperate to hide the nature of her research, find that she was even more secretive than they were, using a false name for her consulting and pushing her fertility research into frontiers that would've given anyone in her lab a perfect motive to kill her.

Busy with comings and goings, but a bit mechanical and homogeneous, too, with a tangle of cases that tend to tap the same reliable emotions, a highly unsatisfactory climax, and not a trace of the dark brilliance of McDermid's The Mermaids Singing (p. 1498).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170676323
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	04/26/2019
Series:	Kate Brannigan Series , #5
Edition description:	Unabridged

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