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

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Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate Younger’s death, but he has other plans as well as the investigation in mind. There are multiple twists and turns throughout the novel which kept me on the edge of my seat, and an ending I never saw coming.

It’s against this backdrop that we meet Addie, a meteorologist who checks mountain top weather stations in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands, but she’s unprepared for her latest discovery - the body of a man entombed in ice. Initially reluctant, he eventually does go which begins the reader’s initiation into possibilities of future travel and its dangers.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. Timings around the effects of climate change have been truncated, as has the speed of technical advances, so it takes a while to get used to what is supposed to be happening. 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.

Cameron volunteered to investigate as he knew his estranged daughter Addie was living in Kinlochleven and he wanted to see her before it was too late. However, the investigation is just an ostensible reason; primarily he wishes to reconcile with the woman who discovered the body, his estranged daughter, Addie. A Winter Grave is the latest standalone thriller by prolific author Peter May, and it was intense, gritty, fast-paced and chilling (in both senses of the word! What she found left no room for doubt that he was murdered - and immediately put herself and Cameron in intense danger. His wife committed suicide, and his daughter, Addie, hates him and has not spoken to him for ten years.

In this standalone novel, Cameron Brodie, a cop has just been handed a bad prognosis from his doctor. Brodie is a detective sent to investigate the body of a journalist found frozen in the snow in Scotland . A dead body encased in ice, multiple murders, and political corruption combine with addiction and a family drama that is irresistible - a one sitting read for me! Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to fly out to investigate Younger’s death, but his ulterior motive is something else all together. The three things I mentioned above were total surprises for me because I didn’t know this before I started reading and this added to my reading pleasure.

Venturing out into a particularly violent storm, Brodie witnesses the extreme weather conditions for himself.I must have purchased this without reading the 'blurb', because its setting in the future took me completely by surprise. I wasn't keen when I started this book which is set partly in the present time and partly in 2050, a very different world where the UK is partially submerged in water and suffering from extreme weather conditions.

The book opens in the near future, not a huge step forward in time but massive changes have occurred. Readers follow him as he conducts the investigation in the present and also delve deeply into his past, learning how he got to his troubled present. With comms and the internet still down, and the Ice storm having cut off the village, Brodie continues to investigate this puzzling murder. By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms.There are flashbacks to the present with climate change deniers and greedy industries where profits are placed ahead of the earth's health, and the population feels helpless midst scientific warnings. I'm a reader who struggles to really visualize scenery, the author was descriptive and helped with this, but occasionally felt like it was too much and just slowed the book down. 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. There’s even a role for future technology the prospect of which might either thrill you or appall you depending on how you feel about flying in a pilotless plane or living in a 3D printed home. All of it occurring some years into our self-determined future (The author’s anticipation of the abuses made possible through AI, is both prescient and terrifying).