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Report for Murder Paperback – January 1, 2004

by Val McDermid (Author)

3.6 1,855 ratings

Book 1 of 3: The Lindsay Gordon Mysteries

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Lindsay Gordon, self-proclaimed cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist is less than overjoyed at the prospect of spending a weekend at a posh girls' boarding school.

Tensions are running high over the school's financial problems; the fact that school alumna and reknowned musician Lorna Smith-Couper, will return to the school to perform at a benefit concert only exacerbates anxieties.

When Smith-Couper is found strangled with her own cello string right before the concert, Lindsay and Cordelia find their new relationship tested in unique ways as they seek to find the murderer among a long list of suspects.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins Publishers Canada, Limited (January 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 000719174X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007191741
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.37 x 0.88 x 7.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #928,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.6 1,855 ratings

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Val McDermid

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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.

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W Spice

Dated, but still very enjoyable

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2012

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Soi-disant "cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist" Lindsay Gordon travels to an English girls' public school during a weekend fundraiser, agreeing to help publicize the need for funds as a favor to an old friend, Paddy Callaghan. During the course of weekend, the fund-raising concert's star attraction is murdered, and Paddy is soon arrested. The school's headmistress enlists the aid of Lindsay, and former student ("old girl," as the Brit's would say) Cordelia Brown, noted author, to prove Paddy's innocence. The two are hardly experienced criminal investigators, and their lack of experience shows. Even so, their loyalty and determination stand them in good stead.

For a first novel, the mystery is pretty solidly plotted, and our intrepid heroines don't allow their budding attraction to interfere with their sleuthing. In finest who-done-it form, there are suspects aplenty, and the bulk of the novel involves Lindsay and Cordelia interviewing them. So, if you're looking for an action-packed thriller, this ain't it, folks. What it is,though, is a helluva lot of fun, a very pleasant, and at times, satisfyingly quirky, read.

Sure, it's a little dated, having been published originally in 1987, but it weathers quite well. After all, people are still reading Sherlock Holmes, right? And, for readers in the US, the style is pretty darned British, though not forbiddingly so. In any case, the mystery is interesting enough, and the reading experience more than fun enough, to overcome those slight drawbacks.

Definitely recommended. Even as a (then) new author, McDermid was far and away ahead of many current best-selling writers, even those with more experience. I'll definitely be reading the others in this series at some point. Nice to see this old series in very affordable e-format.

3 people found this helpful

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K_Win

Lyndsay Gordon Book 1

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2014

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Val McDermid is a wonderful writer. She weaves a tale that bound me to the book and the character. I could not wait to read the sequel. I thought it was very well done. The combination of romance and mystery kept me hanging. Enjoy

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Kindle Customer

The plot was pretty predictable and there were not surprises

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2015

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Not up to the Val McDermid writings I've read before. The plot was pretty predictable and there were not surprises. I thought the characters were uneven and the quick pace of the book left room for character development; it's like Val had to get a book out and this is what she came up with. I was a bit disappointed.

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Amazon Customer

A bit too Enid Blyton for me.

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2011

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Having read several of her later books I was looking forward to this one but was very disappointed.
This could have been one of Enid Blytons Famous Five stories apart from the sexual orientation of a few characters and that they were knocking back whisky instead of lashings of ginger beer!
Really would the headmistress of a private girls school ask a journalist to hang around after someone is murdered at the school - surely you would want the journalist as far away as possible. And allowing said journalist to question staff and pupils, particularly the pupils without a suitable adult present - sorry but too unbelievable for me.
For those concerned about the lesbian aspects don't be to worried there are no detailed descriptions of bedroom antics.
Had I read this book before any others I would have steered clear of Val MacDermid but really this is so different from her later books, too tame for me.

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2014

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wasn't sure I would like this book, but good character development and good story. Interesting plot. Will read more of this series now.

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2015

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What I liked most about this book was how easy it could draw you into the story, there where no complications or struggles to follow the plot, and no backhanded Details to trip you up half-way through. It's a perfect who don it with a little lesbianism on the side

One person found this helpful

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Scott W.

Good story

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2020

Verified Purchase

A bit too long and a little tedious. Not as good as others of hers I have read. Interesting story but not worth the rime.

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porthos

Like Tony & Carol Beter

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2014

Verified Purchase

My personal preference is the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series. I find their characters far more developed than that of Linsay Gordon. I felt that Report for Murder was more in solving the puzzle and less on character development. Even so McDermid is still my favorite author for this genre.

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shannon

Good read

Reviewed in Canada on June 16, 2023

Verified Purchase

Good, solid lesbian mystery. More of a cozy book than her later ones, and with good, entertaining characters.

Craig M Sisterson

Back where a legend began

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

Last year at the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin led a torchlit parade from Stirling Castle (where the festival was officially opened) down through the historic town centre. Fittingly, the King and Queen of 'Tartan Noir' (and legends far beyond those borders) were each celebrating 30 years of their crime writing careers.

While McDermid is well-known for delving deep into the darkness in her hugely popular series starring detective Carol Jordan and profiler Tony Hill (books and characters which were adapted into the television series Wire in the Blood), and her fascinating bestsellers starring cold case detective Karen Pirie, thirty years ago it all began with two journalists: Val, and Lindsay Gordon.

What may surprise some crime-lovers who've become McDermid fans in the last twenty years, is that her very first book was more of a classic Christie-style murder mystery, in a way. Not cosy, but definitely veering much more towards that end of the crime-mystery spectrum than her later books.

Of course, McDermid still brought something fresh to her debut story - especially for the late 1980s - Lindsay Gordon was a protagonist who was working class, politically inclined, and and out lesbian. Quite different from the often intellectual, rather sexless sleuths of the classic mystery form.

Gordon is sent from Glasgow to Derbyshire to cover a fundraiser at a hoity-toity girls school (in the UK it's called a public school, but elsewhere we'd call these 'private schools' - high schools largely for children of the well-off, somewhat removed from the everyday national education system). The environment immediately irks Gordon, a 1980s lefty battling Thatcherite times and struggling financially. Gordon self-identifies as a "cynical socialist feminist lesbian", so McDermid doesn't leave the reader in any doubt. And that's one of the things that distinguishes REPORT FOR MURDER from McDermid's later work - she lays quite a lot out for the reader, with more exposition and set-up.

It's a good read, that flows well and has plenty of interest for readers. I thoroughly enjoyed 'going back to the beginning' to see McDermid in more of her raw early form. While the storytelling isn't as tight or gritty as her later work, there's still a lot to enjoy in REPORT FOR MURDER.

McDermid brings the country public school setting to vivid life; its physical environment and the characters who inhabit it. There's some interesting character interplay, including a hot-cold budding relationship for Lindsay Gordon. It's hard to know looking back from where we are now, but I imagine it was quite groundbreaking at the time: a lesbian relationship portrayed quite matter-of-factly as if it was just any old romance, rather than highlighting it as something unusual or 'edgy'.

All in all, REPORT FOR MURDER delivers a more Christie or Sayers-type mystery than later fans of McDermid may have expected, a murder mystery in a somewhat closed environment, with an amateur sleuth interviewing the suspects and witnesses in order to try and unmask the killer.

13 people found this helpful