Past Lying: A Karen Pirie Novel (Book 7)

"It's April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—but a mere pandemic doesn't mean crime takes a holiday."

In the seventh atmospheric installment of the Karen Pirie series, the world has come to a standstill, but the Historic Cases Unit is about to face one of its most intricate challenges yet. While DCI Karen Pirie is hunkered down in a "quarantine bubble," a call from the National Library changes everything.

An archive from a recently deceased crime novelist, Jake Stein, contains an unfinished manuscript that looks dangerously like a confession. The story outlines a "perfect murder" with chilling similarities to the real-life disappearance of Lara Hardie, a student who vanished from Edinburgh a year earlier.

As Karen and her team attempt to disentangle fact from fiction while navigating strict lockdown protocols, they find themselves drawn into a twisted game played out between two competitive writers. It is a world where publicity is king, and where a fictional plot might be the only map to a very real body.