A second excellent installment to this series; I enjoyed it very much. ( )

This is a busy novel. The story is built around many events of the title year, 1989: the collapse of East Germany and the Berlin Wall, the health care problems caused by the AIDS epidemic, scandals of the pharmaceutical industry, and so on. It's historical fiction based on recent events. Incorporated into that is a story of Allie Burns's career and life: she's still a journalist, but is now working for a ruthless operator in a side of the business away from her investigative reporting. All in all, it's a good read and builds an appetite for a sequel to carry forward Allie's life and career.
Recommended. ( )

At the end of the first volume of the series, Allie had started to get used to her job as a journalist and finally admitted that she is in love with Rona (to her family's total dismay). 10 years later, the 2 of them are still together, now living in Manchester and both do what they do best - work in their chosen fields of journalism.

But that's not the start of the novel. It starts with a man who sets the stage for someone else's death. We don't know who either of these men are or why one of them needs to die but we know a murder is coming.

Just like in the first novel, McDermid mixes real life events with a fictional history. Allie being an investigative journalist and the head of her newspaper's northern operation helps - she ends up everywhere where something is happening. In a year etched forever in the minds of a lot of people, a lot of things happen before the Berlin War tumbled - from distinct events in Northern England such as the Lockerbie memorial, the M1 plane crash a few days later (later known as the Kegworth air disaster) and the Hillsborough disaster to the broader topics such as the HIV/AIDS crisis in Scotland and England (Allie is Scottish after all) and the media reactions to it and to homosexuality.

Mixed with that is the tale of the fictional Ace Lockhart, the owner of the newspaper Allie works for (and a multi-media empire), and Genevieve, Ace's spoiled daughter who expects to inherit his empire. That tale provides the bridge to Europe and sends Allie to Germany and Poland just when things there start heating up. It is also the part of the novel that drags - it feels almost like a mix of a spy novel and an adventure novel - an escape from Eastern Germany for a scientist, a journalist landing in jail before managing to cross back to the West and Stasi's handling of people they dislike. While the story as such may work, it does not fit McDermid's style as well as the rest of the novel and feels like she had to add it because it was 1989 and people expected it.

And that brings us back to the murder. Who is going to die becomes clear very fast. Why he is about to die remains a mystery for a long time - there are too many reasons and any time one turns around, a new reason shows up. The actual reason starts emerging slowly from the mist of time and when Allie, the only person who is still investigating the murder, finally finds the truth, it ends up showing the dead man in an even worse light than his previous actions had (and by that time, he already looks like a perfect candidate for worst human being ever).

1989 is too close in time for this novel to qualify as a historical novel but it works like one for all intents and purposes. It is a chronicle of a time which a lot of readers may remember, tied around a fictional murder and an actual fictional historical mystery. While certain parts did not entirely work for me, I still enjoyed this installment. And as its connection to the previous novel is just in the characters, it can also work as a standalone. ( )

I wanted to like this, but I ended up skipping to the end to find out whodunnit because there was so much going on and I was getting impatient. I’m also experiencing burnout at work at the moment, so I didn’t particularly relish reading about a character having the same kind of burnout as me. ( )

Besides the fact that I enjoyed this as a mystery, I appreciated the coverage of events in Scotland of 1989. Starting with Allie's coverage of the Lockerbie bombing tragedy, this account touches on the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the homophobic atmosphere throughout society in those times. Allie is given assignments in Eastern Europe which bring her into contact with the revolutionary political movements taking place across the Communist sector in that year. All in all, this provides broad-ranging coverage (or at least mention) of one year's happenings that changed history. ( )