HOLY ISLAND

The coming of Christmas to a Northumbrian island, off the northeast coast of England, brings all manner of criminal and sacrilegious horrors.

The winter solstice kicks off with a bang on the island of Lindisfarne with the discovery of Lucy Mathieson, an art student strangled, stripped, and arrayed on an altar at Lindisfarne Priory. Since the 200 souls who inhabit the island are regularly isolated from the mainland by shifting tides, the pool of suspects is limited to people who always thought they knew each other very well indeed. That pool is further narrowed later that day when promiscuous Jolly Anchor barmaid Megan Taylor’s blood is found on the same staircase that caused the death of her mother eight years ago. DCI Maxwell Charles Finley-Ryan, who understandably prefers to be known simply as Ryan, has already made the first act in his reinstatement after a forced three-month leave the appointment of Prof. Anna Taylor, an expert on local pagan practices, as a consultant. Now, as she and Ryan investigate the work of a killer marked by a “strange mix of planned and unplanned,” Anna has to cope with the fact that her sister, whom she’d just seen for the first time since their mother’s funeral, has become a second victim. Ross makes it clear to the reader early on that the murders are the work of a circle of Satan-worshipers but conceals the identity of the ringleaders. It’s a shrewd move, for it puts the melodramatic horrors front and center from the beginning while reserving the more truly shattering personal revelations for the denouement.

As for Lindisfarne itself: “For a holy island, there was little that was sacred on it.”