A thoroughly entertaining yarn.
A man washes ashore in the Outer Hebrides, the pages of his memory completely blank, while in Edinburgh a troubled teen suspects her father did not, as she was told, commit suicide.
The author of a trilogy and two series, May scores here with a standout stand-alone. At its core is an eminently satisfying, multilayered mystery populated with sharply drawn characters. In an immediately engaging opening scene, a man struggles to his feet on a beach on the Isle of Harris. Shivering, confused, and disoriented, he cannot recall how he landed here. Worse, he does not know who he is, though islanders recognize him. Guided, then settled into a cottage he scarcely recognizes, he eventually reunites with Sally, a woman who recalls, and resumes, their affair. Attempting to help him recover, she walks with him up the eponymous Coffin Road, where, in a hollow, they discover several beehives. Curiously, the narrator’s hands bear evidence of bee stings. Sally also prompts the narrator, who comes to think his name is Neal, that he was writing a book about the mysterious disappearance a hundred years ago on a nearby island of three men. To jog his memory, Neal journeys to the island only to discover a corpse with its head split open. Neal fears he was the killer, and police soon think likewise. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the narrative follows Karen, who, in the two years following her father’s suicide, has gone “from being Daddy’s little girl to Mother’s nightmare.” Investigating her father’s suicide, Karen comes to believe he did not kill himself—that he is indeed alive. That conviction sends her into the Highlands, where she faces her own peril. The many threads of the story play out against a landscape that May, a native Scot, renders vividly. His images capture the capricious play of light and weather across the sea and the moors, matching the surprises in his tale.
A thoroughly entertaining yarn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68144-389-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Galveston, Tex., shamus Truman Smith, the slowest-moving of Crider's three series detectives (Gator Kill, 1992, etc.), reluctantly agrees to search for Outside Harry Mercer, a destitute homeless man who turns out to be the most popular fellow on the island. His friend Dino, Truman's client, is looking for him, of course, but so are his homeless buddy Ro-Jo (who thinks Harry might be holed up in The Island Retreat, an abandoned gambling den once run by the uncles, Galveston's homegrown illegal city fathers); ruined millionaire Patrick Lytle (who tells Truman he wants to give Harry a home on his skeletal estate); and Alex Minor (who says he's a lawyer working for Harry's sister). About the only folks who don't seem to be looking for Harry are Truman's boss, bail bondsman Wally Zintner, and his big, nasty bounty hunter Dale Becker— except, of course, that they are. Why the sudden flutter of interest in forgettable Harry? Truman sneaks enough time away from his current reading—Look Homeward Angel, a great book for guys who aren't in a hurry—to tie Harry, together with Braddy Macklin, the onetime uncles' bodyguard he finds dead in The Retreat, to a plan to bring gambling back to the island. Shambling and shapeless, with lots of shooting in darkened rooms in lieu of the kind of suspense that might be sparked by your wanting to know what happened to people you care about.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-8027-3195-3
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stella Carway's dying words to whoever killed her (``I thought you loved me'') are no help in narrowing down the suspects, since, before she was stunned, strangled, and arranged in her flat with the ends of the murder weapon tied in a neat bow around her neck, Stella seems to have been on intimate terms with half the district, from suave Conservative councillor John Faulkner to car repairman Rodney Watson, her bit of rough, and gardener Rory James, the nearest available male. None of which endeared her to her husband, Steven, who'd been moving slowly on his divorce, despite the prenuptial agreement he'd salted away against his own inveterate philandering, or to any of the vengeful women she left in her wake. When news-seller Susan Ratcliffe, whom one of those aggrieved women rather implausibly identified as having gotten into Stella's car on the last day of her life, does a bunk, stolid Chief Inspector Jim Ashworth, already on the track of ú200,000 in blackmail payments Stella wormed out of her husband, has still another trail to follow. But it looks as if his right-hand man, Sgt. Owen Turner, working on the hypothesis of Steven's guilt, will come up trumps, despite being haunted by family problems of his own. Though the solution to the crime is both obvious and underclued, Battison shines in tying his all-too-human coppers' problems to the investigation, producing an uncommonly seasoned and rewarding first novel. The only problem: What room does his ending leave for the sequel Jim Ashworth deserves?
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11463-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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