January 1, 2025
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.
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January 1, 2025
McCluskey debuts with a modern gothic crime novel mired in Scottish legend. Two detective inspectors from Glasgow are sent to investigate when a body is found on a remote Scottish island where three lighthouse-keepers went missing back in 1919 and were never heard from again. Prepub Alert.
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January 1, 2025
Laura McCluskey offers a powerful debut in this atmospheric thriller infused with unsettling folk horror tropes. Glaswegian DIs Georgina (George) Lennox and Richie Stewart have been sent to Eilean Eadar, one of Scotland's Western Isles, to investigate the death of 18-year-old Alan Ferguson, who apparently fell from the island's lighthouse. Alan's death appears to be suicide, but his determination to leave the island and strange bruise patterns foster doubt. Eadar's insular community is an obstacle to their investigation; many of the island's two hundred inhabitants are overtly hostile, and the witnesses to Alan's last days are reluctant to talk without approval of the island's all-powerful priest. Driven to succeed, George downs opiates to manage lingering symptoms of a recent brain injury and relentlessly pursues her instincts that the secrets surrounding Alan's death are connected to the wolf-masked prowler stalking their cottage and the strange howling from the forest she and Richie have been warned to avoid. McCluskey skillfully blends procedural details and looming alienation in this well-constructed mystery; highly recommended.
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