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

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Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to fly out to investigate Younger’s death, but his ulterior motive is something else all together.

There are some good plot twists that keep you hooked, the pace is fast and there are some Hollywood action movie worthy scenes which give a dystopian feel. 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. While he digests this he is dispatched off to Kinlochleven in the Scottish Highlands, in an e-chopper and freshly kitted out with all singing and dancing James Bond style glasses. He has created, in granular detail, an entirely singular, plausible and fascinatingly new version of our own world.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. In 2014 Entry Island won both the Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and a CWA Dagger as the ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year. Add to this a central character prepared to give his all in one last fight and you have a totally gripping crime thriller that is chilling in more ways than one.

Whilst parts of the world are suffering extreme heat, prompting the migration of millions of people from Africa and Asia to Europe, great swathes of Scotland are now under water due to rising sea levels caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheets and the country now has the climate of northern Norway. Scotland has its independence and has made itself self sufficient in energy by building a nuclear power plant. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. I’m not sure it needed the family backstory (it jumps back in time to tell the story of his wife’s suicide) but it does come together in an exciting climax and satisfying ending.It is a winter day; the air is a crystal-clear blue; the sun spreads golden rays on the land below, and a woman is checking a weather sensors station.

He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village. There’s more going on here, Brodie is estranged from his daughter who just happens to be married to the local police officer. Now, the CHARACTERS, most particularly our HERO, Cameron, a detective of some kind, does not battle with what the world has become, longing for “what used to/should again be”. Cameron has personal reasons for wanting to take on the case and his backstory is revealed in flashbacks that begin in 2021. DI Cameron Brodie from the Glasgow police force and pathologist Dr Sita Roy are sent to Kinlochleven to investigate.This book is set in 2051 and climate catastrophe has arrived as it has long been predicted it would. I would like to thank both Netgalley and Quercus books for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. A well-crafted plot, with action and intrigue, twists and red herrings, and a nail-biting climax, make this is another Peter May winner. While the equatorial world is now too hot to sustain life, Scotland has become a country divided between rain and blizzards.

In Scotland the melting ice caps halt the Gulf Stream effect which means it is frequently hit by brutal snow and ice storms. 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.

Now, in “A Winter Grave,” he gives readers a glimpse into life in 2053 – the good and the bad, the different and the same. The three things I mentioned above were total surprises for me because I didn’t know this before I started reading and this added to my reading pleasure. The following morning, despite an ongoing power failure, Sita conducts her PM and concludes that Younger was murdered, noting some anomalies about his body in her findings. By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms.