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In A Winter Grave, the reader meets protagonist Cameron Brodie at two stages in his life: his early career, set in 2023, and a murder investigation in 2051, where he travels to a snow and ice-covered Kinlochleven to face the ghosts of his past. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to fly out to investigate Younger’s death, but his ulterior motive is something else all together. He’s been given the devastating news that he has only months to live, but he needs to meet up with Addie, the meteorologist first, he has something really important to tell her before it’s too late - because Addie is his estranged daughter. I mean, literacy is one of the pillars of civilisation and to damage the opportunity that young people have to read is seriously undermining our society.” No clear path to authorhood
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! And Brodie is determined to take what may be his last opportunity to tell his daughter what he has been silent about for the ten years since her mother’s death. Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy. In the autumn of 2021, Peter watched and read about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow with a growing sense of concern. Just three months earlier, the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published their scariest prediction yet: that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster. Younger’s body has been kept in a refrigerated cabinet of a local hotel, and pathologist Dr Sita Roy, has uncovered some very interesting facts about him, something which puts herself and Brodie in danger. Someone is trying to conceal some extremely crucial information in this Highland village, something that cost George Younger his life. And, as yet another vicious storm closes off the village, together with all communications, Brodie will discover that Younger’s body won’t be the last!
Questions and Answers
Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow detective. He is enduring more problems than most troubled detectives in recent books. His wife committed suicide, and his daughter, Addie, hates him and has not spoken to him for ten years. She blames Brodie for her mother's death and has not allowed him to meet his grandson. If this was not enough to cause despair, he has learned that he has only six months, perhaps less, to live.
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 So I had no intention of writing A Winter Grave. It was only because I had read a synopsis of the IPCC’s latest report and it was chilling and unequivocal – something has to be done this decade. COP26 was coming along and this was the chance to do this and I followed what happened there very carefully.” Dismayed His daughter, Addie, is a meteorologist in the remote Scottish Highlands. She has installed weather stations; her task is to take weather readings and report any changes. She discovers the body of a man encased in ice and suspended in an ice cave. He is identified as George Younger, an investigative reporter who went missing three months earlier. He said he was going hiking on a hill-walking holiday. He was never known to be a hiker or outdoorsman. 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 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.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. Set in 2051, so not that far in the future, the world has undergone massive climate and political change. Many areas of the world are under water; others too hot to be habitable, and if you think that there's a refugee problem now, just wait . . . 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. As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger's investigations had threatened to expose.
The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger who has been missing for three months after going missing on a supposed walking holiday. Younger was no walker making his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven unexplainable. Effectively I had retired,” he says. “I had turned down future contracts from my publisher. I had been doing a book or two books a year for 20 years or more and travelling, all over Europe and all over North America.Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland. Here Oban book blogger Linda Boa gives The Press and Journal her take on May’s latest offering. She also has some questions for Peter May. 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. Peter lives in South-West France with his wife, writer Janice Hally, and in 2016 both became French by naturalisation. (Peter May)
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