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

Product Information

This is set in a futuristic Scotland in a world that has been ravaged by climate changes. We’re only a handful of decades ahead and the landscape and environmental narrative is all very plausible which makes it even the more chilling a possibility, pun intended. Don’t Burn the World was written by Peter and Irish lyricist and poet Dennis McCoy. It is intended to be an anthem for the youth of the world and a plea for action in the face of the climate crisis. It is performed by the Peter May Band and was recorded at his home studio in France. 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.

It is the year 2051. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. A quarter of the world's population has been displaced by hunger and flooding, and immigration wars are breaking out around the globe as refugees pour into neighboring countries. In the autumn of 2021, Peter watched and read about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow with a growing sense of concern. Just three months earlier, the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published their scariest prediction yet: that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster.The climate crisis goes down and down and down the agenda so that it barely gets a mention – and yet it is the single most important thing facing the human race. fivestarread #crime #detectivefiction #dystopian #familydrama #murdermystery #mystery #smalltownfiction #thriller #suspense #scottishnoir Effectively I had retired,” he says. “I had turned down future contracts from my publisher. I had been doing a book or two books a year for 20 years or more and travelling, all over Europe and all over North America. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate Younger’s death, but he has other plans as well as the investigation in mind. He has plans to have conversations with his estranged daughter who is based in the remote Highland village.

Peter kindly agreed to answer a few questions on what inspired him to write this futuristic “cli-fi” novel. 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 So I had no intention of writing A Winter Grave. It was only because I had read a synopsis of the IPCC’s latest report and it was chilling and unequivocal – something has to be done this decade. COP26 was coming along and this was the chance to do this and I followed what happened there very carefully.” Dismayed In A Winter Grave, the reader meets protagonist Cameron Brodie at two stages in his life: his early career, set in 2023, and a murder investigation in 2051, where he travels to a snow and ice-covered Kinlochleven to face the ghosts of his past.

Subscribe to Peter May's "Latest News" mailing list

And Brodie is determined to take what may be his last opportunity to tell his daughter what he has been silent about for the ten years since her mother’s death. 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 Keen to bring this to people’s attention, and wanting to put it in a readable format, Peter decided to use his skills as a journalist to embark on some in-depth research of his own and then use some of what he found within a crime thriller. He decided to set the story almost thirty years from now, in a world transformed by a changing climate.

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. 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. 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. Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland. 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.

He chose to write about it in the context of a thriller and that’s the same approach he has taken with A Winter Grave.