The Black House by Peter May

I reviewed this awesome book for Eurocrime last year (see here) and it gives me great pleasure to put this review on my blog. Man (otherwise known as Mike) wrote this review recently and is my first guest blogger.

I hope you enjoy the review, and the book. If you've not read it yet you should hurry up as the final part of the trilogy is due for release in January 2013!!!

Upon arriving at Bloody Scotland, Scotland's first crime fiction festival, in September, I resolved not to buy any more books ("any more" as I'd a hefty stack back at home). But, the temptations of the text proved too strong and I came back with a few, one of which was The Blackhouse by Peter May.

Fin Macleod is a detective with Lothian and Borders Police based in Edinburgh. On top of investigating a grisly, unsolved murder Fin is struggling to both accept the death of his young son in a hit-and-run and to save his marriage. Despite these woes, Fin's guv dispatches him to the remote Isle of Lewis on the North-west of Scotland, as the local bobbies have a murder that bears a startling similarity to Fin's Edinburgh case. For Fin this is not only a new case, but a return home after many years of self-imposed exile. As he investigates, and true to the genre, he meet his childhood friend, Artair Macinnes and sweetheart, Marsaili, old memories return to haunt him, and long buried secrets from the past are dragged into the present.

The Blackhouse is an atmospheric read. The wind-swept, wave-battered, spare Lewis, populated by tough, God-fearing folk provides a suitably brooding landscape for Fin's investigation. May provides plenty of local colour (much of it shades of black and grey) with the stand-out being a gruelling description of Lewismen's annual guga harvest on the barren Atlantic rock of An Sgeir (An Skerr - non-Gaelic speakers, like me, will find the pronunciation page most useful!) May's use of third-person for Fin in the present and first-person for Fin in the past, helps us to contrast then and now and how our childhood experiences shape our whole lives, for better or worse. My only complaint was a sudden ending, but no worry, the next in the trilogy, The Lewis Man, is now out, and the conclusion, The Chessmen, arrives in January.

Just the read for a dark autumn evening, 4/5.

A big thank you to Amanda for allowing me onto her blog :-)