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

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I write 3,000 words a day when I am working on a book and I’m usually finished a book in about seven weeks.” The joy of research 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. Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village. So in the last few months I have done a lot of tweeting and Facebook posting about library closures, particularly in the area I grew up in. At my old school they are even talking about doing away with the librarians and I get so mad at that! The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger who has been missing for three months after going missing on a supposed walking holiday. Younger was no walker making his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven unexplainable.

Q: In your research, was this how the scientists you spoke to saw the Scotland of 2051, with the seas rising due to melting ice caps, etc? Peter lives in South-West France with his wife, writer Janice Hally, and in 2016 both became French by naturalisation. (Peter May) A young meteorologist takes a work based trek up a mountain and is faced with a dead body, frozen in ice. This chance discovery leads to a rollercoaster of secrets and intrigue and the body count starts to mount in this bleak and remote landscape. 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.Once again, Peter May has returned to Scotland with a complex novel that combines climate apocalyptic changes, murder mystery and a domestic situation that has left a policeman’s relationship with his daughter severed for the past 10 years. As the story begins, we are in the year 2051, in a very altered Scotland and a very altered world. While the equatorial world is now too hot to sustain life, Scotland has become a country divided between rain and blizzards. Coastal areas are gone. Travel is by new evolved methods that go limited distances. But crime still exists.

Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger’s death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village. A: I chose Kinlochleven because it was a place I knew and loved. But it was also the perfect location for my story. And ideal for painting a picture of how our world might be transformed by climate change.

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. Peter also looked into the possible transport of the future driven by electricity and green hydrogen produced by renewable energies, for example an eVTOL plane, plus icom mobiles. He used a specifically commissioned drone to explore the area high up above the loch he uses within A Winter Grave and used the footage from that within his story. I mean, literacy is one of the pillars of civilisation and to damage the opportunity that young people have to read is seriously undermining our society.” No clear path to authorhood

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.

"The Man With No Face"

Younger’s body has been kept in a refrigerated cabinet of a local hotel, and pathologist Dr Sita Roy, has uncovered some very interesting facts about him, something which puts herself and Brodie in danger. Someone is trying to conceal some extremely crucial information in this Highland village, something that cost George Younger his life. And, as yet another vicious storm closes off the village, together with all communications, Brodie will discover that Younger’s body won’t be the last! This is a compelling blend of an environmental/political thriller with a puzzling mystery. There’s humour although this rightly diminishes as danger levels rise, there’s plenty of tension, excitement accompanied by a building menace and peril. There are some good plot twists that keep you hooked, the pace is fast and there are some Hollywood action movie worthy scenes which give a dystopian feel. Throughout it all there is atmosphere in abundance in the Highlands setting with cruel weather to further highlight the hazardous situations. Notes: Extraordinary People was also published as Dry Bones. The Critic is also known as A Vintage Corpse. Hidden Faces was also published under the title The Man With No Face. If You Like Peter May Books, You’ll Love… No idea. But someone was out there in the hall listening to us talking in here. I don't know how much they could hear, or why they would want to, but they ran off through the snow when I went after them with my torch.'

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

A world of temperature extremes

It’s the year 2051, and the subject of climate change has been ignored for so long, and now it’s too late, with catastrophic changes taking place across the world. Huge areas of the world are under water, whilst others are too hot to be habitable. Cameron Brodie is an experienced policeman who’s just received a devastating health prognosis. As a keen hillwalker, he is asked to fly to the village to ascertain whether the death was accidental, or more sinister. 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. 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.