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

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Many things are strangely different in 2051, while others are bluntly the same. May sets the story in a politically different Scotland. There are advances in technology, developments in transportation, and changes in the environment; there are also expected and unexpected complications in all areas. 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? The chorus is sung by a children’s choir from the Isle of Lewis, adding resonance to the song’s message of protecting the planet for future generations. When the body of investigative journalist George Younger is discovered entombed in an ice tunnel in the Mamore Forest, veteran Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate. However, the investigation is just an ostensible reason; primarily he wishes to reconcile with the woman who discovered the body, his estranged daughter, Addie. The two haven’t spoken for over ten years, since the death of Brodie’s wife, Mel.

The research aspect is Peter’s favourite part of the process. “I generally enjoy it more than the writing,” he adds. Among the articles, books and documents he gets through, he says: “I usually manage to come across a book or two that really set my juices going, my imagination gets fired up.” A Winter Grave is set in Scotland but it’s not a Scotland we would recognise. The year is 2051 and Scotland has achieved independence and rejoined the European Union. However, at the same time, the effects of climate change on the world have become all too obvious. 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. 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.” 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. While Peter hasn’t quite managed to make good his escape from his writing career, he is excited that he has been able to find the time to release a song about the climate crisis to coincide with the publication of A Winter Grave’s.A: I chose Kinlochleven because it was a place I knew and loved. But it was also the perfect location for my story. And ideal for painting a picture of how our world might be transformed by climate change.

Peter also looked into the possible transport of the future driven by electricity and green hydrogen produced by renewable energies, for example an eVTOL plane, plus icom mobiles. He used a specifically commissioned drone to explore the area high up above the loch he uses within A Winter Grave and used the footage from that within his story. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Quercus Books via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of A Winter Grave by Peter May for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. Younger’s body has been kept refrigerated in a cabinet and what Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy uncover during the autopsy puts both their lives in danger. Brodie must fast his past as well as a killer who is desperate to keep secret what George Younger’s investigations had threatened to expose. 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.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. Peter lives in South-West France with his wife, writer Janice Hally, and in 2016 both became French by naturalisation. (Peter May) At the end of it, I thought I have got to write about this, and the problem was how. I don’t want to preach to people so I decided so I would write a conventional thriller and set it 30 years in the future and the world would just be changed by the climate crisis.” Time hop Cameron Brodie is an experienced policeman who’s just received a devastating health prognosis. As a keen hillwalker, he is asked to fly to the village to ascertain whether the death was accidental, or more sinister. Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. 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.

The first death is confirmed as suspicious. Another murder follows. Brodie is cut off from help in a village where an unidentified killer is hiding. He would be their obvious next victim… Questions and Answers 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. Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland.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. 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. Writing can be a lonely experience, but when you are researching you are out there in the world. If I think of all the research trips I made to China over about seven years, I met so many people, made so many friends and saw such extraordinary things.”

It’s a gripping read, which sees the latest technology being used to deal with rising tides. New nuclear power stations at Ballachulish ensure Scotland has power. But extreme weather sees electricity and internet cut off, and Brodie stranded. 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. So in the last few months I have done a lot of tweeting and Facebook posting about library closures, particularly in the area I grew up in. At my old school they are even talking about doing away with the librarians and I get so mad at that! 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 the year 2051, and the subject of climate change has been ignored for so long, and now it’s too late, with catastrophic changes taking place across the world. Huge areas of the world are under water, whilst others are too hot to be habitable.The man had no interest in hillwalking. But he was found in a frozen grave in a difficult-to-reach spot above Kinlochleven. Murder in the mountains I do a very detailed synopsis, I do the drafting side of it when I am working on the synopsis,” he says. “Then when I’m finished it, I’m finished it – I don’t want to see it again, it’s on the spike!” 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. This is a chilling novel – both literally and metaphorically. Set in the year 2051, after decades of politicians ignoring and denying the effects of climate change, the equatorial regions are now far too hot for human habitation, whole swathes of low-lying areas are totally submerged in the sea and, because of the destruction of the Gulf Stream, Scotland now suffers winters of stormy Arctic severity.