1979

Its place in Allie Burns

1979 is book 1 in the Allie Burns series. It is followed by 1989. See the full Allie Burns reading order.

Val McDermid's newest series follows Allie Burns, a young Scottish journalist breaking into a newsroom that doesn't want her there, across a planned run of decade-spaced novels that double as a history of British investigative journalism from the late 1970s onward. 1979 opens with Allie fighting for bylines at a Glasgow paper on the eve of Thatcherism and stumbling into a story about drug trafficking and political corruption that nobody wants published; 1989 picks her up a decade later, further into her career…