A Winter Grave: a chilling new mystery set in the Scottish highlands

Product Information

He was really in with the Chinese police,” says Peter. “It was like getting an introduction to the mafia from a made man! When I first went I was met at the airport by the police, which was a bit alarming. They just whisked me off to my hotel and then took me to the police university.” Climate change While Peter hasn’t quite managed to make good his escape from his writing career, he is excited that he has been able to find the time to release a song about the climate crisis to coincide with the publication of A Winter Grave’s. Glasgow Police DI Cameron Brodie, fresh from failing to get murder conviction due to technical complications, rejects his DCI’s request to accompany the pathologist to perform a post mortem on Younger, and, noting his expertise in hill walking, examine the scene. But then he receives a diagnosis adverse enough to change his mind.

It’s exhausting, all my contemporaries were retiring so I thought, why can’t I retire? I wanted to read for pleasure and to get involved in music, which is the other big thing in my life.There are multiple twists and turns throughout the novel which kept me on the edge of my seat, and an ending I never saw coming. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate Younger’s death, but he has other plans as well as the investigation in mind. He has plans to have conversations with his estranged daughter who is based in the remote Highland village. I do a very detailed synopsis, I do the drafting side of it when I am working on the synopsis,” he says. “Then when I’m finished it, I’m finished it – I don’t want to see it again, it’s on the spike!”

This is another terrific, riveting read from a creative and talented author. I love the attention to detail in things such as possible advances between 2022/23 and the future and he makes it feel plausible. Equally credible is the immensely sobering climate change scenario and the political impact this could have. He makes me completely buy into it and be even more mindful and concerned. The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable. It’s a gripping read, which sees the latest technology being used to deal with rising tides. New nuclear power stations at Ballachulish ensure Scotland has power. But extreme weather sees electricity and internet cut off, and Brodie stranded. It’s not just the weather that provides the chills in ‘A Winter Grave’ - this is a remote Scottish Highland village, cut off by extreme weather conditions, no means of communication, a killer that clearly knows the landscape, and uses it to his advantage, a rollercoaster of emotions for Brodie and Addie, lots of twists and turns, utter fear at times, and a completely gripping storyline. Highly recommended! While initially these threads may have felt a bit disparate, they came to flow well together for me, filling in aspects of the story as and when needed for the sake of all the characters involved. May is expert at creating settings of all kinds, here majestic, beautiful, threatening, and deadly. He also can devise plots that are complex but are not overdone. He cares about his characters and makes them human. The three stories, of climate, of crime, of family, work out along side each other, though the climate story really hasn’t worked out at all!

Questions and Answers

This is a chilling novel – both literally and metaphorically. Set in the year 2051, after decades of politicians ignoring and denying the effects of climate change, the equatorial regions are now far too hot for human habitation, whole swathes of low-lying areas are totally submerged in the sea and, because of the destruction of the Gulf Stream, Scotland now suffers winters of stormy Arctic severity. I had never thought about being a journalist but I got a place on an NCTJ training course in Edinburgh, trained for a year and got a job on the Paisley Daily Express.”