Clean Break (Kate Brannigan, Book 4) - Softcover

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and attended Oxford University. She worked as a journalist in Scotland for 14 years, becoming National Bureau Chief of a major national Sunday tabloid. She quit journalism in 1991 and has since become a full-time writer. She is creator of both the Lindsay Gordon and the Kate Brannigan mystery series. Her novel, A Place of Execution (St. Martin's, 2000) was recently named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 2000 and won the L.A. Times Book Prize in the new murder/mystery category. It was also shortlisted in 2001 for the Edgar Award and has been nominated for the 2001 Boucheron Anthony Award. Her latest Lindsay Gordon novel, Booked for Murder, was nominated for the Best Lesbian Mystery by the Lambda Literary Fdn., 2000, and has been chosen by Bookspan's Insight/Out book-of-the-month club.

The fourth Kate Brannigan mystery finds the British equivalent of Kinsey Millhone trying to crack a case in which a ring of smash-and-grabbers is stealing artwork from country estates. Kate is involved because her security firm was responsible for one of the burgled homes. The owners of the estates are reluctant to bring in the police because so much of their income is generated by tourist excursions through their homes and they fear the publicity. In one of the homes, the intruders' activity is recorded, and Kate recognizes one of them--it's Dennis, Kate's close pal and her connection to the criminal underworld. She has some hard choices to make but is willing to put them off if she can recover the stolen property. Dennis points her in the right direction, but soon the case takes a far more sinister turn, with people connected to the thefts turning up dead all over the countryside. When a trip to Italy reveals Mob involvement, Kate realizes the stakes are much higher than a few pieces of stolen art and that her life means nothing to those involved in the crimes. Brannigan is tough, funny, and sometimes profane. Wes Lukowsky