Copyright

      HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1995

      Copyright © Val McDermid 1995

      Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

      Cover design © MavroDesign.com

      Cover photographs © Michael Trevillion/Trevillion images(house); Jonathan D. GoForth/Getty Images (red gate); Patrick Chambers (grass); Shutterstock.com (wire)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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      Source ISBN: 9780008134761

      Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007327560

      Version: 2015-10-08

       An Introduction by Lee Child

      This is a twentieth-anniversary edition, which means a third of my life has been shared with Val McDermid, first on the page, and then from time to time in person. More than a third, actually, because The Mermaids Singing wasn’t her first book, and anyway I’m pretty sure I read her before she wrote any books at all – once she was a journalist covering the north of England for several newspapers, and at the time part of my job at Granada Television in Manchester was to study the local press in order to keep current with the local mood and feeling. Which was lucky for me – back then there was no internet, obviously, and no organized recommendation network for readers, so to get my fiction fix I used to walk up to Waterstones on Deansgate and browse the then-chaotic but richly packed crime section, where I suppose I must have recognized her name from a newspaper byline. Local girl makes good, I suppose I thought, which was enough of a nudge to make me give her a try.

      And I’m glad I did. I caught up with what I had missed, and eagerly awaited each new title thereafter. This edition rightly celebrates her first major award-winning book, but she’s far from a one-hit wonder. In fact any or all of her books could or should have won awards, because she’s remarkably consistent. As a reader I remember vaguely trying to work out how and why, and then later as a writer myself I revisited the question