'Heart wrenching. . . . McDermid delves ever more deeply into the psyches of the major characters . . . [and] excels in putting the reader at the center of the action. . . The Skeleton Road does an excellent job of wrangling with these big ideas inside a tightly paced mystery.'--Janet Napolitano, Los Angeles TimesThe Skeleton Road, now available in paperback, is a gripping standalone novel about a cold case that links back to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. In the center of historic Edinburgh, builders are preparing to demolish a disused Victorian Gothic building. They are understandably surprised to find skeletal remains hidden in a high pinnacle that hasn't been touched by maintenance for years. But who do the bones belong to, and how did they get there? Could the eccentric British pastime of free climbing the outside of buildings play a role? Enter cold case detective Karen Pirie, who gets to work trying to establish the corpse's identity. And when it turns out that the bones may be