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Blue Genes is the fifth story in the Kate Brannigan series by Scottish author Val McDermid. Written in 1996, the book has mature content dealing with death and sexual themes.[ citation needed ]
Kate Brannigan, a private investigator based in Manchester, England, confronts four problems simultaneously. She is commissioned to catch two fraudsters who have been cheating recently bereaved people by promising high-quality gravestones at a reduced price if a down payment is made that evening, then disappearing with the money. A neo-punk rock group, Dan Druff and the Scabby Heided Bairns, commission her to trace protection racketeers who are sabotaging their flyposting and gigs. Her business partner Bill has fallen in love with an Australian and plans to marry and move to Australia, closing the detective agency as he owns most of the shares. Her best friend Alexis, a lesbian journalist also asks for Kate's help. Her girlfriend Chris is pregnant following an illegal treatment using genetic material from one woman's ovum to make another pregnant. The doctor responsible for the fertility treatment has been murdered. Alexis and Chris fear that the murder investigation will lead to their being exposed and their baby being taken from them, and beg Kate to use her skills to cover their traces. [1]
Brannigan darts around Manchester at a furious pace coping with all four issues, frequently playing fast and loose with the law sometimes to uphold and sometimes to frustrate it, and aided by a cast of engaging characters such as Richard her rock journalist boyfriend, Gizmo, an unsociable hacker open to pecuniary incentive, Giles the yuppie financier, her friend DI Della Prentice, Dennis, a burglar doing time who is her key advisor on current trends in crime and a selection of the Northern English lesbian community.
The book has won no current awards but was runner-up for the Young Adults book of Fictional Events.[ citation needed ]
Have His Carcase is a 1932 locked-room mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers, her seventh novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It is also included in the 1987 BBC TV series. The book marks a stage in the long drawn out courting of Harriet Vane by Wimsey. Though working closely with him on solving the book's mystery, she still refuses to marry him.
Kate Garry Hudson is an American actress and singer. She has received various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for an Academy Award.
Valarie McDermid, is a Scottish crime writer, best known for a series of novels featuring clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill, in a sub-genre known as Tartan Noir.
Meera Syal FRSL is an English comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and by portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No. 42. She has become one of the UK's best-known Asian personalities.
Veronica Guerin Turley was an Irish investigative journalist focusing on organised crime in the Republic of Ireland, who was murdered in a contract killing believed to have been ordered by a South Dublin-based drug cartel. Born in Dublin, she was an athlete in school and later played on the Irish national teams for both Association football and basketball. After studying accountancy she ran a public-relations firm for seven years, before working for Fianna Fáil and as an election agent for Seán Haughey. She became a reporter in 1990, writing for the Sunday Business Post and Sunday Tribune. In 1994 she began writing articles about the Irish criminal underworld for the Sunday Independent. In 1996, after pressing charges for assault against major organised crime figure John Gilligan, Guerin was ambushed and fatally shot in her vehicle while waiting at a traffic light. The shooting caused national outrage in Ireland. Investigation into her death led to a number of arrests and convictions.
The Dead Zone, also known as Stephen King's The Dead Zone is a science fiction drama television series starring Anthony Michael Hall as Johnny Smith, who discovers he has developed psychic abilities after a coma. The show, credited as "based on characters" from Stephen King's 1979 novel of the same name, first aired in 2002, and was produced by Lionsgate Television and Paramount Network Television for the USA Network.
Pacific Drive is an Australian television series made by Village Roadshow in association with New World International for the Nine Network which screened for 390 episodes from 29 January 1996 to December 1997, when it concluded it was show in reruns being in a late night timeslot for years. It was also repeated for a daytime slot on Nine while they lobbied (unsuccessfully) to the Australian Broadcasting Authority for a daytime drama to count towards their local drama quota points.
Absolute Power is a 1997 American political action thriller film produced by, directed by, and starring Clint Eastwood as a master jewel thief who witnesses the killing of a woman by Secret Service agents. The screenplay by William Goldman is based on the 1996 novel Absolute Power by David Baldacci. Screened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, the film also stars Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, Scott Glenn, Dennis Haysbert, and Richard Jenkins. It was also the last screen appearance of E. G. Marshall. The scenes in the museum were filmed in the Walters Art Museum, where Whitney is copying a painting of El Greco, "Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata"
Mark Christian Ashton was a British gay rights activist and co-founder of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) support group. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and general secretary of the Young Communist League.
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Lizzy the Lezzy is an animated stand-up comedy series about a woman called Lizzy who talks mostly about lesbian interests. The sketches contain graphical sexual material but not graphic imagery.
Fever of the Bone is a novel written by noted Scottish crime author Val McDermid. It was published by Little, Brown in Great Britain (2009) and HarperCollins for the United States and Canada (2010), and is the sixth novel in the series featuring psychologist Dr. Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. Several of the books in this series have been adapted into the television series Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green as Tony Hill and Hermione Norris as Carol Jordan.
Karen Price was a 15-year-old Welsh murder victim who disappeared in 1981. After the discovery of her body in 1989, British facial reconstruction artist Richard Neave used her skull to create a model of her physical appearance. The reconstruction and the matching of DNA in the body to that of Price's parents allowed her body to be identified. The case was cited as one of the first instances in which DNA technology was used in this way.
Grim Pickings is a 1989 Australian television miniseries. The miniseries was adapted from the 1987 Jennifer Rowe novel of the same name, the first in her Verity Birdwood series of murder mysteries.
Rosie Garland FRSL is a British novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Traces is a British television crime drama produced by Red Production Company. Co-created and written by Val McDermid and Amelia Bullmore, and based upon an original idea by McDermid, it originally premiered on Alibi on 9 December 2019. The series was rerun on BBC One on 4 January 2021 and Series One began repeating on Drama on 15 January 2022, A second six-episode series was released in February 2022. and was shown on BBC One from 30 March 2024.
Jacqueline Susan Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Janet Mayo were two young women who were murdered in separate incidents in 1970. Both women were last seen hitch-hiking along motorways in England, and both were sexually assaulted before being strangled to death.
