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It's Val McDermid, so you know it's good (and gay!), but WOW did she try to pack a lot into one book. HIV and the Berlin Wall and Nazi atrocities all tied together with newspaper string, and there's also a murder mystery sprinkled in at the beginning and then picked up again in the last third. I almost said "sloppily," but we're talking about Val McDermid. She doesn't really do sloppy. But in anyone else's hands this would have been a huge mess. As it is, it just manages to be all right.