Common Murder
Ace reporter and lesbian socialist Lindsay Gordon is once again in the thick of events when an alleged assault at a women's peace encampment north of London turns deadly. After a former lover of Gordon's is first accused of attacking, and then murdering, prominent citizen and vocal anti-Brownlow Common activist Rupert Crabtree, Gordon finds herself embroiled in an investigation with far-reaching implications. These extend far beyond the women's peace movement, all the way up to the highest levels of Her Majesty's government.
In the course of solving a crime that some authorities are determined to pin on a community of women activists, Gordon is forced to confront all the contradictions in her life: her personal loyalties as a friend and a lover, her political convictions as a working-class lesbian, her professional responsibilities as a journalist, and her civil obligations as an English subject.
As she works her way through the tangle of personal conflicts and state secrets that led to Crabtree's murder, Lindsay Gordon discovers, sometimes to her own surprise, what concessions she can make in her life and what things are beyond compromise.
Val McDermid
Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.
The Lindsay Gordon Mysteries
The Lindsay Gordon Mysteries consists of six books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
