THE WOLF TREE

A young cop and her weathered partner brave a tempestuous sea crossing to investigate a death in a remote community off the coast of Scotland.

When DI Georgina Lennox and her partner, Richie Stewart, arrive on the island of Eilean Eadar, they are half-chilled to the bone and already known to—and disliked by—most of the people around them. A young man fell to his death from the lighthouse a few weeks before, and they’ve been sent from Glasgow to confirm his death was a suicide. To a community suspicious of “mainlanders,” a category that includes anyone who can’t trace their bloodline back generations, the two cops are a nuisance at best, a threat at worst, and the unfriendly welcome begins to feel downright hostile when George sees someone outside their cottage at night wearing a wooden wolf mask. She can also hear the howls of wolves, despite the fact that there are none on the island. Still recovering from a near-death experience on the job eight months prior, George is dealing with her own trauma, and her tendency to self-medicate in order to keep the headaches at bay. Five days in the salt-crusted, fish-centered village leads to little clarification about Alan Ferguson’s death, but a whole lot of new mysteries, including the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1919. Even if a remote, insular Catholic island guided by a steely-eyed priest sounds like a familiar folk horror set up, McCluskey is masterful at building suspense around a sense of place and a feeling of otherness. And George, fretfully uncomfortable in her skin and her partnership, is a prickly, vulnerable, completely engaging heroine with a cop’s instincts through and through, a stubborn streak that nearly gets her into trouble and the courage to risk herself in the quest for truth.

Idealistic, maybe. But properly gothic as well.