A gripping plot, pitch-perfect characterization, and an appropriately bleak setting drive this outstanding series debut. May gives it an urgency that, by novel’s end, makes perfect sense. For once in crime fiction, a detective confronting demons from his past is not merely a stock plot device. The isolation and desolation of Lewis is an apt metaphor for Macleod. The two narratives are brilliantly executed until they converge in an absolute stunner of an ending. The reader knows that Macleod, against all odds, overcame poverty and bad schooling to win a spot at the University of Glasgow and that he threw it all away in his sophomore year and became a cop, a decision he’s regretted ever since. The other, which eventually informs the first, is Macleod’s first-person memories of his life on the island. One involves Macleod’s struggles with confronting people whom he left behind years ago. Edinburgh cop Fin Macleod, originally from Lewis, is assigned to the case for no more reason than that he speaks Gaelic. Two bodies are found hanging from trees: one in Edinburgh, the other on the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly isle in the Outer Hebrides. *Starred Review* Scottish novelist May (whose series include the Enzo Files, starring a Scottish forensic scientist working in France) starts a projected trilogy, again with a Scottish sleuth, with a shotgun blast of a debut. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Peter May has crafted a page-turning murder mystery that explores the darkness in our souls, and just ho The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision. For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice.
Each year the island's men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past. When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge.
The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people's fear of God.
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