Val McDermid: ‘It Doesn’t Get Easier, It Gets Harder!’ | Literary Hub

As with all her novels, McDermid demonstrates an enormous amount of empathy with her characters, a quality that makes the novel-to-novel transitions within each series remarkably smooth, even though her protagonists may have gone through gut-wrenching changes in their personal and professional lives, and even though McDermid will have written at least one other book-a standalone or different series installment-in between. She also clearly relishes calling on recurring characters such as forensic anthropologist River Wilde and digital technician Tamsin Martineau, giving her fictional world a consistent familiarity while packing her narratives with keen-and often comedic-observations.