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This is the second in the series featuring Allie Burns as an investigative journalist. This time she is covering key events for the year 1989.

Although 1989 touches on key moments such as the Lockerbie bombing, the Hillsborough disaster and Poll Tax protests, events that would be meaningful to the time, the prime focus is also on a media tycoon which has a passing resemblance to someone real.

Her character’s name is Ace Lockhart who owns the newspaper she works for, a decorated war veteran, a survivor of the Nazi regime, which wiped out his Polish village. These details will be important to keep in mind by the end of the book.

When the novel opens, a murderer is making their way to Lockhart’s remote Scottish island to lace his vitamin pills with cyanide. That scene is planted like a grenade, to explode at some point in the future. Thereafter the clock is ticking as the plot gathers momentum.

Although sometimes slowly.

The scope of the author’s novel is ambitious, there is a lot of headlines of the day to cover, but it is not wholly successful. Trying to place one journalist at the center of all of these events feels strained at times.

Still, it is McDermid and there are A LOT of headline stories here to resolve.

And then there was that mystery to solve.

But... was it a story that intrigued me as a reader? Or did it feel like an intellectual exercise?

The good news, was the ending. And for any investigative journalist, it is all about the headlines and cracking the case, right?

So, at least, there is resolution. 3.5 stars.