Crack Down and Clean Break by Val Mcdermid

Crack Down and Clean Break by Val Mcdermid

Crime writing of the very highest order . Kate Brannigan has turned into the most interesting sleuthess around --The Times (U.K.)

There was only one reason Manchester-based private eye Kate Brannigan was prepared to let her boyfriend help out with the investigation into a car sales fraud nothing bad could happen. In Crack Down, Kate learns that once again with Richard you have to expect the unexpected.

With the unexpected being Richard behind bars, Kate seems to be the obvious choice to look after his eight-year-old son who proves even more troublesome than his father. She soon finds herself dragged into a world of drug traffickers, child pornographers, fraudsters and violent gangland enforcers, bringing her face to face with death in the most terrifying investigation of her career.

And in Clean Break, Manchester-based private eye Kate Brannigan is not amused when thieves have the audacity to steal a Monet from a stately home where she's arranged security. She's even less thrilled when the hunt for the thieves drags her on a treacherous foray across Europe as she goes head to head with organized crime. And as if that isn't enough, a routine industrial case starts leaving a trail of bodies across the Northwest, giving Kate more problems than she can deal with.

Cleaning up the mess in Clean Break forces Kate to confront harsh truths in her own life as she battles with a testing array of villains in a case that stretches love and loyalty to the limits.

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into forty languages, and have sold over seventeen 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 Theakston 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, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She writes full time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.