A Winter Grave

When I saw that this novel was set in the year 2051, I wasn't so sure about it because I hardly ever read futuristic, dystopian-type books, but I'm certainly glad that I stuck with it. A fast-paced, tight thriller (with a high body count), this standalone from Peter May offers a potential glimpse at our not-so-distant future with commentary on climate change, technology and politics. The story alternates between "the past" of 2023 and "the present" of 2051. COVID is still hanging around in 2051, along with extreme cold and heat, and never-ending rain and flooding, but crime, drugs and murder are still hanging around, too. May does a great job of introducing and fleshing out his characters, even in a novel that moves fairly quickly. This one was hard to put down and will give you a lot to think about as well.

I have enjoyed Mr May’s books for several years. I love his mysteries in general. But I don’t read mysteries to get a lecture on “climate change “ and immigration. Probably won’t read any of his new ones.

to me this rates as one of peter may books the storyline was great, also the characters were so interesting i could hardly put this one down a great read

Once again, Peter May has returned to Scotland with a complex novel that combines climate apocalyptic changes, murder mystery and a domestic situation that has left a policeman’s relationship with his daughter severed for the past 10 years. As the story begins, we are in the year 2051, in a very altered Scotland and a very altered world. While the equatorial world is now too hot to sustain life, Scotland has become a country divided between rain and blizzards. Coastal areas are gone. Travel is by new evolved methods that go limited distances. But crime still exists.

Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie has a lot on his mind when asked to volunteer to travel to the West Highlands to investigate a body found in the ice, to establish whether a crime had been committed. He knows his estranged daughter, Addie, lives in the area too. Initially reluctant, he eventually does go which begins the reader’s initiation into possibilities of future travel and its dangers. It also leads to flashbacks into Brodie’s earlier life and family. We learn his family’s background.

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!

Rating 4 to 4.5*

It’s hard to resist a police procedural set in a harsh, inaccessible setting, where the investigation is rendered so much more complicated by the inherent difficulty of gathering evidence. This crime scene is practically apocalyptic: a remote mountain village snowed in for the winter, with body that required a team of mountaineers to extract from the ice. Detective Cameron Brodie has the climbing skills to be the logical choice to travel to the village and investigate the murder, and he has personal motives both for getting out of Dodge and for heading to this particular area. The story takes place in 2051, when climate change has drastically altered weather patterns and human settlements worldwide. There’s nifty technology for detecting ubiquitous deepfakes, autonomously flying helicopters, and instant on-site DNA analysis gadgetry. This idea is clever but takes a while to introduce; for a few chapters I was worried that the book was going to end up spending too much time preaching about the perils of climate change and not actually getting to the mystery. It’s worth sticking with it, though. Once the story gets going, it’s compelling and fast-moving, with dangerous criminals on the loose and added drama from the perils of the setting and also from deep family tensions. The futuristic details are sprinkled more sparingly and to occasionally amusing effect: used Teslas being dumpy cars for people who can’t afford better, and SD cards with multi-terabyte capacities.

Thanks to Netgalley and Hachette for a digital advance review copy.

Peter May is a must read author for me and I was so glad to be given this Arc to review. A remarkable and enjoyable dark and eerily twisty novel. One of his best!