Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex
Sample of authors
McDermid, Val
Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer born in Kirkcaldy, Fife. She attended Kirkcaldy High School where she was among a group of pupils that participated in a controversial project for especially talented students based on IQ tests.
When she was seventeen, she was the first student from a Scottish state school to be admitted to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she graduated with a Bachelor o...
Literary figures
Merci Rayborn
Gender: Female
Female police detective, based in Orange County in California and featured in a trilogy by T. Jefferson Parker. Merci Rayborn is young, attractive, stubborn and devoted to her work – but is dogged by misfortune. Already in the first book, she makes a mistake which leads to the death of an older colleague – and he is the father of her as-yet-unborn son. As a single mother, she solves crimes where h...