COFFIN ROAD, an unposted 2017 review of the best PETER MAY novel I've read

COFFIN ROAD
PETER MAY
riverrun press
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his latest mystery set in Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, award-winning author Peter May spins a tale about three disparate cases that may or may not be linked...

On the remote Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, a man washes up on a deserted beach, hypothermic and completely disoriented. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his condition is a map of the island showing a desolate, ancient path called the Coffin Road. With a sense of dread and no clear idea what lies at the other end, he knows he must follow the trail if he has any hope of discovering his identity.

Meanwhile, homicide detective George Gunn makes the rough ocean crossing to a remote, sea-battered lighthouse on a rock in the northern Atlantic, twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, to investigate a brutal murder. Despite its isolation, the tiny island has seen its share of tragedy: more than a century earlier, three lighthouse keepers disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. And now there is a new tragedy, and Gunn must figure out what happened.

At the same time, a teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her father's death. Two years after the discovery of the pioneering scientist's suicide note, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that her father would willingly abandon her. And the more she discovers about the nature of his research, the more she suspects that suicide had nothing to do with it.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER IN 2016. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ten years ago I flew through all 400pp of this read, and excitedly left this note:

Far and away the best book of Peter May's that I've read. An exciting and involving read. More later. Or earlier, I suppose, depending on which end of the telescope you're looking through.

When I went looking for my notes made to write my weekly summary post for GBBO over on LibraryThing, I found my unposted review! (Not the notes I wanted, though.) So I'm posting it here for this year's #Deathtober blogging, and in sad acknowledgment of Author May's death on 25 September 2026. I suspect I never came back to post it because that was about the time I ran seriously afoul of the Spoiler Stasi abd decided "hell with it" and forgot it existed.

The story opens on a beach. Don't get too excited, it's a Scottish beach so colder than a Republican's heart. A man awakes cold and confused:

I have no idea where this is. And for the first time since consciousness has returned, I am aware, with a sudden, sharp and painful stab of trepidation, that I have not the least notion of who I am.

That breathless realisation banishes all else. The cold, the taste of salt, the acid still burning all the way up from my stomach. How can I not know who I am? A temporary confusion, surely? But the longer I stand here, with the wind whistling around my ears, shivering almost beyond control, feeling the pain and the cold and the consternation, I realise that the only sense that has not returned to me is my sense of self. As if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance.

Nothing like the smell of the North Atlantic Ocean in the morning. As he searches for a name (it's Neal, for now), for a way to discover who he is, ID or any other details, belongings...anything...he encounters a woman who seems to know him as she walks near the beach. Sally helps Neal-for-now home, some data starts coming into his slippery memory and mostly slides right out again having nothing to stick to:

They say that all any of us are is the sum total of our memories…Take them away and all you are left with is a blank. Like a computer without software.

It's true, and it scares me, as it does most people or writers would not use the trope with the regularity they do (particularly in thrillers where the need for the main character to act fast and to have a great urgency to do something is acute). Our hero reflects, "{it's a}s if I inhabit the body of a stranger, in whose uncharted waters I have been washed up in blind ignorance," as he attempts to unferstand what on Earth has landed him in a situation where:

Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Traigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat...someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.

As he puts together who he is and what he is doing, why he us at great risk of death, many truths and dacts sort themselves into an extremely ugly pattern:

Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on {corporate criminals} to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.

Neal-for-now's discovered, conveniently near a cursed murder site in a lighthouse, evidence that chemical companies researched neonicotinoids and knew what effect the pesticide would have:

‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to {Bad actor}, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. {Bad actor} is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab {a hostage he's rescuing} by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull {the hostage he's rescuing} off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide {the hostage he's rescuing} away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth.

As you'll see from my rating there were some issues with the way the story unfolded, plot holes, a looseness with the timeline; but you also see how exciting the story is. This is proof Author May began writing in the vineyards of television...you can see the above in your inner TV room, I'm sure...before retiring to the vineyards of the South of France to write exciting novels. I like this one best of all of them I've read.

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.

Second Entry in Series, THE LEWIS MAN, scores!

THE LEWIS MAN
PETER MAY
Quercus (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times raved: "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth." Among the many honors received, The Blackhouse, the first novel in May's acclaimed Lewis trilogy, won the Barry and Crime Thriller Hound awards.

In The Lewis Man, the second book of the trilogy, Fin Macleod has returned to the Isle of Lewis, the storm-tossed, wind-scoured outer Hebridean island where he was born and raised. Having left behind his adult life in Edinburgh—including his wife and his career in the police force—the former Detective Inspector is intent on repairing past relationships and restoring his parents' derelict cottage. His plans are interrupted when an unidentified corpse is recovered from a Lewis peat bog. The only clue to its identity is a DNA match to a local farmer, the now-senile Tormod Macdonald--the father of Fin's childhood sweetheart, Marsaili--a man who has claimed throughout his life to be an only child, practically an orphan. Reluctantly drawn into the investigation, Fin uncovers deep family secrets even as he draws closer to the killer who wishes to keep them hidden.

Already an international bestseller and winner of numerous awards, including France's Prix des Lecteurs du Telegramme, The Lewis Man has the lyrical verve of Ian Rankin and the gutsy risk-taking of Benjamin Black. As fascinating and forbidding as the Hebridean landscape, the book (according to The Times) "throbs with past and present passions, jealousies, suspicions and regrets; the emotional secrets of the bleak island are even deeper than its peat bog."

My Review: I gave this second book in the Lewis Trilogy a higher rating The Blackhouse because the amount of backstory was equal, but put in the mind, and the heart, of Alzheimer's afflicted "Tormod Macdonald." This made all the difference to my reading experience. His awful past was a gut-punch to me, and all I'll say about the matter is that the Irish branch of the Catholic Church has a boatload of apologizing and begging for forgiveness to do.

As the complexities of Fin's, Marsaili's, and Donald Murray's deeply intertwined pasts and presents unfold in front of us, accented by the heartbreaking agony for all who love a dementia suffer, the bittersweet nature of aging and its compensatory widening of the inner emotional landscape come into sharp relief:

Getting old doesn’t make them any less valid, or any less real. And it’ll be us one day.

Simple, short, and very true.

The landscape of these Outer Hebridean islands is well suited to the story May is telling. The islands are scoured by Arctic winds, rains frequently unexpected and blown horizontally by F4 and greater gales, peppered with decaying ruins of human attempts to wrest a living from this dark and angry landscape. Watching the lives of others spin out of control is a deep and shameful pleasure. This is a story full of that pleasure.

Nor is it devoid of the basic satisfaction of the whole genre: Bad people don't escape their misdeeds. In fact, retribution for past wrongs is the foundation of this story. That healing, forgiveness, and new opportunities for better days are here as well is what keeps this book from being unbearably grim. May's books show that mastery of structure that comes from screenwriting is able to translate satisfyingly to the novel's page and pace.

Peter May takes us to an Ancient Scotland in THE BLACKHOUSE, first of a trilogy

THE BLACKHOUSE
Peter May
Quercus (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3* of five, but just barely

The Publisher Says: From acclaimed author and television dramatist Peter May comes the first book in the Lewis Trilogy—a riveting mystery series set on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, a formidable and forbidding world where tradition rules and people adhere to ancient ways of life. When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle of Lewis that has the hallmarks of a killing he's investigating on the mainland, Edinburgh detective and native islander Fin Macleod is dispatched to see if the two deaths are connected. His return after nearly two decades not only represents a police investigation, but a voyage into his own troubled past. As Fin reconnects with the places and people of his tortured childhood, he feels the island once again asserting its grip on his psyche. And every step forward in solving the murder takes him closer to a dangerous confrontation with the tragic events of the past that shaped--and nearly destroyed--Fin's life.

The Blackhouse is a thriller of rare power and vision that explores the darkest recesses of the soul.

My Review: This was a huge, long slog of a story, alternating between Fin (the main character) as narrator of his life of unremitting grimness and misery, and third person limited, basically the camera-eye PoV that one would expect to find in a novel by a screenwriter. This made the pace slow for me as each time we shift, I have to hit the brakes or push in the clutch to shift up.

This isn't to say that the author is a bad writer, his prose is limpidly clear. But keep Google open while you're reading, since there are unexplained, untranslated Gaelic words all over the place. There are exciting sea scenes and tense moments of nailbiting stress during the islanders' unique rite of passage for males.

There are also characters who are unnecessary, flashbacks of unconscionable length and questionable necessity, and an ending that will break a decent person's heart...that has holes the size of a gannet in it. (You'll get the joke later.) If the ending is true, and I think it is true to the character and the build-up, the obliviousness of the responsible adults of the island is unconscionable and unpleasant.

Trigger warning for animal rights activists and the tenderhearted towards all gawd's creation, and for child abuse.