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

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May sets his story in a near future where an independent Scotland has rejoined the EU, and climate change has significantly raised sea levels, causing widespread flooding and a huge increase in climate refugees, which exacerbates racism, and a plague of resistant German cockroaches: he paints a realistic if rather frightening picture of how the world could look if climate change is allowed to progress at the current rate. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to attend a crime scene in the mountains where a body has been discovered frozen in the ice.

If this was not enough to cause despair, he has learned that he has only six months, perhaps less, to live. Someone is trying to conceal some extremely crucial information in this Highland village, something that cost George Younger his life. The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. L'histoire est bien ficelée, humaine et, quand on connaît l'Ecosse (de l'ouest en particulier), on se laisse emporter par l'intrigue.

It’s a difficult story to sum up and also a hard book to rate as I had such mixed feelings about the various elements here. He also hopes to reconcile with his estranged daughter and explain a misunderstanding that has caused her hatred. The amazing standard of writing made me feel as though I was there in the snow, hail, blizzards, up the mountains.

Meanwhile, Brodie has kept to himself the fact that the woman who found the body, the wife of the local bobby, is his estranged daughter. Melting ice has stopped the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, resulting in northern Europe, including Scotland, being hit by raging blizzards and ice storms. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to fly out to investigate Younger’s death, but his ulterior motive is something else all together.

I would like to thank both Netgalley and Quercus books for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. What May does with out being preachy, is to get you to focus on the possible outcomes of global warming. There are only a few characters involved: Cameron Brodie, his daughter, the journalist, the whistle blower, the pathologist, the policeman and the hotel owner. But, THIS author, refreshingly, leaves behind all that has become common and cliched about our near-future.

Readers follow him as he conducts the investigation in the present and also delve deeply into his past, learning how he got to his troubled present. But, the author, having completed his creation, then takes our hands, so we can run together through his raging hurricane of how’s, why’s, when’s and what’s, coming out exhausted but the better for it. Because of this a quarter of the world’s population has been moved due to hunger and flooding, forcing refuges no other option but to escape into other countries.

Set against a backdrop of a frighteningly plausible near-future, A WINTER GRAVE is Peter May at his page-turning, passionate and provocative best. A young meteorologist named Addie is checking a mountain top weather station and discovers the body of a man encased by ice. However, it is clever and innovative, and the ultimate truth of how necessary it is to make a difference with your life, lasts after you finish reading.