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Ah, that lovely feeling of returning to a series where you like the premise and the characters, the plots are intriguing, and the writing hasn't gone stale as the author struggles to be creative. Val McDermid's Allie Burns series will probably be self-limiting since she is setting the books at 10 year intervals; having begun with 1979, there can only be 5 (unless she's still writing them in 2029!).

McDermid uses her crime fiction talents and her journalism background to weave Allie's investigations into the real-life events of the day. 1989 starts at the very beginning of the year, with the funerals of victims of the Lockerbie bombing, followed quickly by the M1 plane crash in Leicestershire. A few months later Allie is on the scene at the Hillsborough soccer disaster in Sheffield. [Aside: Until checking it out after reading this book, I was still under the impression that the 97 victims died as a result of rowdy fans mobbing the field. Not so. Decades later coroners' inquests confirmed that the cause was mismanaged crowd control by police, covered up at the highest levels.]

Against these events, Allie is pursuing a story of greater interest to herself, though not to the tabloid journal that has purchased the paper she writes for. She learns that trials of drugs designed to prevent HIV from turning into full-blown AIDS may have been manipulated, taking advantage of the desperation of those afflicted. Her investigations take her to East Berlin, still under the iron grip of the Stasi months before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

And that, dear reader, isn't all - there are more plot elements, one of which goes all the way back to WWII. Sounds like too much stuffed into one book, doesn't it? Fortunately, the way McDermid has redefined Allie's job means that she isn't deeply involved in most of the stories. Just enough to make her wonder, by the end of the book, whether she might be ready for a career change.

I wonder what she'll be doing in 1999?

p.s. As with 1979, there are frequent references to the pop music of the time. The epilogue to the book is "Allie's" top 50 tunes playlist. Can't say I recognized all of the names, but Allie and I do share a fondness for The Eurythmics. :-)