THE CHESSMEN, third Lewis Trilogy mystery from Peter May

THE CHESSMEN
PETER MAY (Lewis Trilogy #3)
Quercus (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: PETER MAY: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT MURDER TO THE OUTER HEBRIDES

THE NEW START

Fin Macleod, now head of security on a privately owned Lewis estate, is charged with investigating a spate of illegal game-hunting taking place on the island.

THE OLD FRIEND

This mission reunites him with Whistler Macaskill - a local poacher, Fin's teenage intimate, and possessor of a long-buried secret.

THE FINAL CHAPTER

But when this reunion takes a violent, sinister turn and Fin puts together the fractured pieces of the past, he realizes that revealing the truth could destroy the future.

My Review: The series is complete. My relief is genuine.

I'll find something to say in due course.

**DUE COURSE HAVING ELAPSED**

Peter May cut his storytelling teeth in Scottish television, creating two prime time drama series and script-editing a third. He is very clearly Scottish, choosing an unfamiliar and unforgiving setting for this series: The Hebrides, no less than Ann Cleeves's more famous Shetland TV and book series, is globally known for its distilled essence of Scottishness. No smart author who wasn't Scottish would dare to do this.

But the problem is that the Hebrides form an atmospheric backdrop for a personal saga of surpassing ordinariness. The gross-out food-gathering antics of the Hebrideans in The Blackhouse aren't integral to the murder, they're the handy means for it. The Lewis Man came off better than The Blackhouse because it was a universal plot far more compelling than the first one, but again the Hebrides could as easily have been the Balearics or the Cyclades.

Now, at the end of the trail, we're confronted with a murder that frankly makes no sense, a murder that makes all the sense in the world, a death that's explained in as bloodless (in the bad sense) a way as any in detective fiction, and a hit that my shoulders have been hunched in anticipation of since the middle of The Lewis Man.

I'm not one for book reports, so go read the synopsis and some more spoilery reviews to glean some insights into which might be what. I'm here to tell you that this wasn't a satisfying three-book read. But, the Gotcha! Gang is now crouched above their keyboards waiting to snort in derision, you read them! Yep. I did. I got the series from Quercus and, even though it takes me forever to get around to reviews these days, I still honor my commitments.

The end result of my reading isn't the sense of time wasted so much as time misused. The author has storytelling chops. He deploys the expected tropes in the usual order and does so against the background of a culturally unique place without, as Cleeves does, allowing us a deeper-than-guidebook sense of the ways and means of these isolated folks. I would be howling to the stars about these books if I'd felt the crimes had originated organically in Hebridean soil. The author's ability to make a story one wants to follow isn't in question. The main character is a homecoming middle-aged ball of grief and rage, so that's familiar. He isn't anyone we haven't met before, but he's well developed enough for that not to be a major concern.

In the end, I'm not sure what to tell you. If Scotland is a fascination of yours and you're a murder-mystery addict, ie if you're me, yeah sure read away. Don't expect a peak experience. If you're a tartan noir person, and why the hell wouldn't you be?, these will occupy summer beach hours adequately. Even refreshingly, given that there isn't a single warm day in any of the texts.