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

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Here’s how the judges described me: “An accomplished author, at the height of his powers with this latest trilogy. He manages to vary his settings while always creating completely believable characters.” Read more about “The Dagger in the Library” and the shortlist here: In 1991 I returned, this time in search of a story. I went to Beijing on a tourist visa, but spent my days and nights exploring the city, talking to people, getting a sense of the place. Although the new, modern Beijing, under Deng Xiaopeng, was already springing up around me, it still felt hugely alien. No one spoke English. Street signs, menus, shop names, maps, everything was written in Chinese characters. Even the Pinyin romanisation of Chinese was rare. A Winter Grave and its message is going to be high profile in the next few weeks – it comes out on Thursday (January 19). Peter is doing a tour of talks that brig him to Inverness. And the book will be in every supermarket – and the top promoted book in Tesco’s. So, for example, climate-wise in this Peter May future, Scotland’s summers would be colder and wetter with freezing winters with more snow and ice storms. My 1981 book, “The Man With No Face”, was set against Britain’s uncertainty about its future place in Europe. Ten years later my book, “The Noble Path”, followed refugees fleeing from war, taking to flimsy boats to cross treacherous bodies of water. Sound familiar?

I am not often moved to blog about things I read in the tabloid press, but I was incensed by this ignorant, poorly researched piece of trash “journalism” perpetrated by a pompous columnist called Richard Godwin in a rag called the London Evening Standard. Then, with the development of my story, came his only clue – a map with the coffin road traced in marker pen. Filled with a deep sense of dread, he knows that following in the footsteps of the dead is the only chance he has to restore meaning to his life, and that his only hope is that the coffin road will lead him to revelation. Enzo Macleod is a biology teacher at a French University. Macleod grew up in Scotland and worked as a forensic scientist. He is married and has a daughter as well. He lives a simple, routine life with not much happening, but he is happy with what he does. Before I go, here are my dates in the UK and Paris, I hope you’ll come along and see me if you can… ENTRY ISLAND TOUR 2014 And so we return to Luskentyre beach on the Isle of Harris, and a to man who is washed up without memory or reason…

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In the event, nothing could prepare me for the appalling climatic conditions that battered me on my arrival on the island. Up in the mountains winds were gusting to a 100 kph, spitting rain and stinging hail into my face. During a week of I had an extraordinary sense of having arrived somewhere special, a society preserved as in aspic, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it. The story is set in the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, where the protagonist grew up. While Fin is on the island to attend family members’ funerals, something sinister is happening in that place. A murderer is on the loose, and stopping him will be difficult. I know a lot of people are pleased that I’m making a return to the Western Isles, and readers of the Lewis Trilogy will be happy to know that there will be at least one familiar face. Detective Sergeant George Gunn’s services are required when the dead body of a man is found near the lighthouse on the Flannan Isles.

He says: “I suppose I have perhaps a slightly louder voice than most people. But in the end I decided I couldn’t write about climate change in itself, that’s not a story you can manage in terms of a book.”Edinburgh, 16th – 18th August for the Edinburgh Book Festival, for an event at Peppers Theatre 6.45pm 16th August