1979

Scotland, January 1979: blizzards, strikes and power cuts convulse a country on edge, and inside the newsroom of the Glasgow Daily Clarion, investigative journalist Allie Burns is fighting for stories that matter. Tired of being handed "women's stories," Allie teams up with fellow reporter Danny Sullivan to chase two threads that keep pulling them deeper into danger: an international tax-fraud scheme reaching into the pockets of wealthy men, and a cell of Scottish ultranationalists willing to turn violent ahead of a referendum on breaking away from the United Kingdom.

As their reporting starts drawing real attention — and real enemies — Allie has to out-report a newsroom that doesn't expect a woman to break the big story, while the pair's investigations pull them toward people who would rather silence them than be exposed. Drawing on her own years as a Glasgow reporter, Val McDermid recreates 1979 in vivid, lived-in detail: the smoke-filled newsroom, the hammering typewriters, and a country wrestling with questions of identity, class and power it still asks today.

The first novel in McDermid's Allie Burns series, 1979 earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, which called its plot "engrossing" and its period atmosphere "brilliant."