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A Winter Grave takes place in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands; one that is in the grip of an ice storm. May has, as always, created the perfect atmospheric setting for his work. She shivered, in spite of standing in front of the flames. 'I don't like this place,' she said. 'I've spent half my life with corpses. But the thought of that dead man folded into the cake cabinet in the kitchen gives me the willies.' 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.
Q: In your research, was this how the scientists you spoke to saw the Scotland of 2051, with the seas rising due to melting ice caps, etc? A good read but I think it was more about me not getting absorbed by the novel than it not been a good book. I have always enjoyed this authors writing and even though I wasn’t fully convinced by this novel I still enjoyed it. 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.I write 3,000 words a day when I am working on a book and I’m usually finished a book in about seven weeks.” The joy of research 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. A Winter Grave is not an easy read; the near future is quite bleak so to say, in more than one meaning. It is, however, a great dystopian thriller which will set you thinking. Peter is determined to do his bit to halt the climate crisis, and says modestly: “I thought well, I have got perhaps a little louder voice than some people. The only thing I can do is make that noise heard above the roar of denial.” 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.
Brodie has an ulterior motive for volunteering to take on this case. He has received a death sentence of his own, and has something personal he has to get out of the way before he departs this earth for good. So, in reality, he is a man with nothing to lose, and a will to live. In 2003 I read Firemaker, the first thriller by Peter May, and although the details are a bit fuzzy, I still remember how impressed I was with this book. And for those here on GR who read Dutch: I reviewed Firemaker, The Killing Room (De moordkamer) and Chinese Whispers (De seriemoordenaar). This could slow or stop the Gulf Stream, which is what brings temperate weather to Western Europe and the British Isles. With equatorial temperatures creating an unliveable wilderness, forcing hot air north to deform the Jet Stream, ice cold air is dragged down from the Polar Vortex. Thus creating a world of temperature extremes. As Brodie investigates the death of a man found frozen in the ice of a snow tunnel, it becomes clear his enemy is not just the person or persons responsible for the man’s death but the weather as well. Ferocious storms have become a frequent occurrence for the residents of Kinlochleven, resulting in power cuts and the loss of communications with the outside world for days at a time. Venturing out into a particularly violent storm, Brodie witnesses the extreme weather conditions for himself. ‘He seemed to be driving headlong into the gale. Hailstorms flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the windscreen… He could barely see the road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow on the recently cleared tarmac.’But here in Scotland, a body has been found frozen in the ice near Loch Leven, that of one Charles Younger, an investigative journalist with the Scottish Herald who had been reported missing three months earlier, and Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie volunteers to travel there along with the doctor who will do the post mortem, Dr Sita Roy. 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. The dead man is investigative reporter George Younger, who’d been missing for three months. What he’d been doing on a mountain top is a mystery, as those who knew him said he wasn’t an experienced hill walker at all.
No idea. But someone was out there in the hall listening to us talking in here. I don't know how much they could hear, or why they would want to, but they ran off through the snow when I went after them with my torch.'I had never thought about being a journalist but I got a place on an NCTJ training course in Edinburgh, trained for a year and got a job on the Paisley Daily Express.” A Winter Grave takes place in the not-too-distant future, in 2051. It begins with the discovery of the body of an investigative reporter.
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