AudioBooksReview: Peter May

Showing posts with label Peter May. Show all posts

Peter May, Entry Island

Read by Peter Forbes

Peter May is clearly drawn to isolated small communities and inspired by the tensions and drama they provide. Those disappointed that May’s Lewis Trilogy has now been completed will find much in Entry Island to make up for things.

This time a detective by the name of Sime Mackenzie investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman on Entry Island, which is 850 miles from the Canadian mainland in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and which, as its name suggests, was the first stopping point for all the migrants from Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The seemingly open and shut case, in which the victim’s wife, drenched in her husband’s blood, is the only suspect, turns out to be much more complicated than at first sight.

Mackenzie, who was sent from Montreal to bring in the suspect, is of course the only member of the police force to think that all might not be as it seems. Mackenzie’s judgement, however, is clouded by a host of issues. First, his ex-wife Marie-Ange is the crime scene investigator appointed to the case. Then he discovers Marie-Ange has been having an affair with his superior officer and that all his colleagues have known of this for months. Finally, when he meets the suspect, Kirsty Cowell, he has the uncanny feeling that he knows her.

Parallel to the murder investigation May recounts the story of one of Mackenzie’s forebears, taken from a journal written 200 years ago, which tells of the Scottish Highland clearances and the fate of Simon, son of a crofter, and another Kirsty, daughter of a wealthy land-owner, whose life Simon saves when he is only a young boy, but who remains his loyal friend despite the social barriers that divide them. The journal story is a tour de force on its own. Combined with a claustrophobic procedural, an emotionally and physically exhausted insomniac detective painfully conscious of his Scots roots and a series of convoluted twists of plot and circumstance, Entry Island is another masterpiece in the Peter May canon.

* * * * *

Buy Entry Island

The Blackhouse by Peter May

read by Steve Worsley

Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy has for good reason drawn praise for its enviable prose – the vivid descriptions, almost palpable atmosphere – and for its psychological and emotional depths. In The Blackhouse, May brings maturity and grandeur to the crime novel that remind us of some of the greatest of Scots storytellers. This is certainly more literature than pulp – full of dark truths that make it at the same time compelling and disturbing. And any avid reader will celebrate the added power brought to the audiobook by the narrator Steve Worsley.

It will be a rare listener who is not drawn in by the setting, the characters, the plot, the denouement. There are two murders with similar MOs – the first in Edinburgh, where former Lewis man police detective Fin Macleod is living, having recently lost his young son in a hit and run accident, a second on the Isle of Lewis, which is why Macleod is sent to investigate. His local knowledge will be invaluable, and it will take his mind off his own bereavement.

But Macleod’s return to where he grew up stirs up more than simply memories of his boyhood. There are more profound revelations, including the existence of a teenaged son, Fionnlagh, born to the girl he fell in love with when they met at primary school and who followed him to the mainland where they began at the university. Fionnlagh, like Fin before him, is set to make the treacherous annual voyage to a far-off rock in the middle of the sea to cull and bring back the gugga seabirds that are still prized as delicacies by the locals. The Blackhouse of the title is the only shelter on this awful place. When Fin made the trip, as a teenager himself, he almost lost his life after slipping on the guano-covered slopes of the island. And it is the long-incubated rivalry, envy and jealousy, having festered all the years since Finn’s distantly recalled accident, that finally reveal themselves in a dramatic climax to the novel. Only this time, Finn’s new-found son is going to pay for what ensued.

A modern classic.

* * * *

Buy The Blackhouse

The Lewis Man by Peter May

read by Peter Forbes

The Lewis Man is not to be dismissed simply as ‘crime fiction’, a label often associated with those last-minute grabs from mountainous piles at airport bookshops. The mise en scène of The Lewis Man might read at first like a murder thriller, but it is so much more. A corpse, which could have lain buried for thousands of years like the famous peat men of recent discovery and celebrity, is recovered from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis, except that a tattoo of Elvis Presley visible on the darkened flesh makes the date of death much more pressing of enquiry, as do his injuries. And when DNA from the remains is matched to some recently taken from all the men on the island during the murder enquiry in the first Lewis novel, The Blackhouse, Former Detective Inspector Fin Macleod is drawn into the drama. It turns out the dead man is related to Tormod Macdonald, father of Fin’s childhood love Marsaili, whose house is overlooked by the ruin Fin is attempting to bring back to life.

Tormod is now an elderly man suffering from dementia, thrown out by his wife and rescued by Marsaili before he is found refuge in a care home. He always claimed to be an only child and, like many in the Islands, was fervently anti-Catholic. But we hear brief remembrances of his boyhood and upbringing in the small moments of lucidity in his deepening dementia; and we learn a different story – tragic, profound and moving – as Fin discovers the painful truth of Tormod’s relationship with the body buried in the peat, and their bitter experience of Scottish Roman Catholicism.

Peter May’s writing in the Lewis novels has a literary quality that makes these books equal to the best authors writing in English in the twenty-first century. And, arguably, his prose is even better in Peter Forbes’ reading, which is superb – sympathetic, dramatic and intense in all the right places: a true tour de force.

* * * * *

Buy The Lewis Man

The Chessmen by Peter May

read by Peter Forbes

The brooding presence of both landscape and weather fill Peter May’s Lewis Man trilogy, which comes to a commanding close in the final instalment, The Chessmen, available now as a Quercus audiobook.

This is the art of the audiobook at its finest. And reader Peter Forbes is unparalleled in his timing and execution. I can imagine sitting down and reading the book in the time-honoured fashion, but it is with Forbes’s Scots timbre and rhythm that the tale really comes alive. The whole cast of place names, lochs, mountains and coastline are so much more immediate and real when read in the right voice.

The tale itself is full of chance and circumstance and regret and tragedy and dark withering humanity. A tale for winter. Full of sound and fury.

The protagonist, Fin Macleod, is head of security on a privately owned Lewis estate in what must be the northernmost isle off Scotland’s west coast. He is looking into a recent spate of poaching that seems to be taking place on an industrial scale. The landowner ill, his spoiled son who has taken over the running of the estate is quick to make enemies, amongst them Fin’s boyhood friend and saviour Whistler Macaskill, who lives from what he can catch in the forests and in the lakes where he has spent his entire life. He is the carver of the eponymous chessmen – as large as life and replicas of an ancient set discovered at one time on the isle. He is keeper of a secret that bonded a group of the local young people as they grew up at school, at university on the main land, and then when they formed a music group that went on to fame and fortune in exile.

As the book opens, a freak storm diverts a small loch to reveal a crashed light plane – a plane that went down many years before. Inside is what is taken to be the partially preserved body of one of Fin’s and Whistler’s boyhood friends. But is all as it at first seems?

This audiobook simply cannot be recommended highly enough. You are sure not to be disappointed.

Exceptional.

* * * * *

Buy The Chessmen