A Winter Grave

A Winter Grave is the ninth stand-alone novel by award-winning Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, Peter May. In November 2051, a young meteorologist is checking her weather station in the western Scottish Highlands when she comes across a body in a patch of ice in a corrie. Three months earlier, award-winning Scottish Herald investigative journalist, Charles Younger, the bane of corrupt politicians, went missing near Loch Leven.

Glasgow Police DI Cameron Brodie, fresh from failing to get murder conviction due to technical complications, rejects his DCI's request to accompany the pathologist to perform a post mortem on Younger, and, noting his expertise in hill walking, examine the scene. But then he receives a diagnosis adverse enough to change his mind.

After a slightly rocky introduction, Brodie finds that he gets on quite well with police pathologist Dr Sita Roy, and both are relieved when their eVTOL (electric helicopter) sets them down safely during an ice storm, in the blacked-out village of Kinlochleven.

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. The blackout prevents instant analysis of the likely killer's DNA, as well as stopping their eVTOL being recharged, effectively grounding them.

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. Addie Sinclair is not best pleased to see her father, and vocal about it. But they are forced together to climb the mountain and check what is now a murder scene. But why, they both wonder, was a journalist with no hill-walking experience take the difficult trail up to a high peak?

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.

With comms and the internet still down, and the Ice storm having cut off the village, Brodie continues to investigate this puzzling murder. But certain incidents add an atmosphere of menace, and then there's another murder, which won't be the last before Brodie departs the Kinlochleven.

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.

Interspersed throughout Brodie's narrative are flashbacks to 2023, when he first met Addie's mother, gradually revealing what has weighed so heavily on Brodie's conscience for a decade. May includes some interesting tech, and his characters have depth and appeal. A well-crafted plot, with action and intrigue, twists and red herrings, and a nail-biting climax, make this is another Peter May winner. Unputdownable.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Quercus