A Winter Grave: a chilling new mystery set in the Scottish highlands

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He chose to write about it in the context of a thriller and that’s the same approach he has taken with A Winter Grave.

Inevitably rising sea levels from melting Polar ice caps causes widespread flooding, altering the shape and nature of all our coastlines. Peter also looked into the possible transport of the future driven by electricity and green hydrogen produced by renewable energies, for example an eVTOL plane, plus icom mobiles. He used a specifically commissioned drone to explore the area high up above the loch he uses within A Winter Grave and used the footage from that within his story. As Brodie investigates the death of a man found frozen in the ice of a snow tunnel, it becomes clear his enemy is not just the person or persons responsible for the man’s death but the weather as well. Ferocious storms have become a frequent occurrence for the residents of Kinlochleven, resulting in power cuts and the loss of communications with the outside world for days at a time. Venturing out into a particularly violent storm, Brodie witnesses the extreme weather conditions for himself. ‘He seemed to be driving headlong into the gale. Hailstorms flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the windscreen… He could barely see the road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow on the recently cleared tarmac.’ Peter lives in South-West France with his wife, writer Janice Hally, and in 2016 both became French by naturalisation. (Peter May) No idea. But someone was out there in the hall listening to us talking in here. I don't know how much they could hear, or why they would want to, but they ran off through the snow when I went after them with my torch.'It’s not just the weather that provides the chills in ‘A Winter Grave’ - this is a remote Scottish Highland village, cut off by extreme weather conditions, no means of communication, a killer that clearly knows the landscape, and uses it to his advantage, a rollercoaster of emotions for Brodie and Addie, lots of twists and turns, utter fear at times, and a completely gripping storyline. Highly recommended! His daughter, Addie, is a meteorologist in the remote Scottish Highlands. She has installed weather stations; her task is to take weather readings and report any changes. She discovers the body of a man encased in ice and suspended in an ice cave. He is identified as George Younger, an investigative reporter who went missing three months earlier. He said he was going hiking on a hill-walking holiday. He was never known to be a hiker or outdoorsman.

In the autumn of 2021, Peter watched and read about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow with a growing sense of concern. Just three months earlier, the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published their scariest prediction yet: that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster. I do a very detailed synopsis, I do the drafting side of it when I am working on the synopsis,” he says. “Then when I’m finished it, I’m finished it – I don’t want to see it again, it’s on the spike!” This is a chilling novel – both literally and metaphorically. Set in the year 2051, after decades of politicians ignoring and denying the effects of climate change, the equatorial regions are now far too hot for human habitation, whole swathes of low-lying areas are totally submerged in the sea and, because of the destruction of the Gulf Stream, Scotland now suffers winters of stormy Arctic severity.

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It’s exhausting, all my contemporaries were retiring so I thought, why can’t I retire? I wanted to read for pleasure and to get involved in music, which is the other big thing in my life. But here in Scotland, a body has been found frozen in the ice near Loch Leven, that of one Charles Younger, an investigative journalist with the Scottish Herald who had been reported missing three months earlier, and Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie volunteers to travel there along with the doctor who will do the post mortem, Dr Sita Roy. The first death is confirmed as suspicious. Another murder follows. Brodie is cut off from help in a village where an unidentified killer is hiding. He would be their obvious next victim… Questions and Answers In 2003 I read Firemaker, the first thriller by Peter May, and although the details are a bit fuzzy, I still remember how impressed I was with this book. And for those here on GR who read Dutch: I reviewed Firemaker, The Killing Room (De moordkamer) and Chinese Whispers (De seriemoordenaar).

Peter is determined to do his bit to halt the climate crisis, and says modestly: “I thought well, I have got perhaps a little louder voice than some people. The only thing I can do is make that noise heard above the roar of denial.” Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.I mean, literacy is one of the pillars of civilisation and to damage the opportunity that young people have to read is seriously undermining our society.” No clear path to authorhood

Younger's body has been refrigerated at a creepy hotel where he and Sita are the only guests. Her findings suggest the cause of his death and other troubling evidence. What is discovered puts the lives of Sita and Brodie in extreme jeopardy and leads to several more deaths. His daughter is still rejecting Brodie, and his time to reconcile is running out. There are some intense, breathtaking actions, and a political coverup is revealed. Many things are strangely different in 2051, while others are bluntly the same. May sets the story in a politically different Scotland. There are advances in technology, developments in transportation, and changes in the environment; there are also expected and unexpected complications in all areas. A Winter Grave takes place in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands; one that is in the grip of an ice storm. May has, as always, created the perfect atmospheric setting for his work. Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland. Keen to bring this to people’s attention, and wanting to put it in a readable format, Peter decided to use his skills as a journalist to embark on some in-depth research of his own and then use some of what he found within a crime thriller. He decided to set the story almost thirty years from now, in a world transformed by a changing climate.So I had no intention of writing A Winter Grave. It was only because I had read a synopsis of the IPCC’s latest report and it was chilling and unequivocal – something has to be done this decade. COP26 was coming along and this was the chance to do this and I followed what happened there very carefully.” Dismayed Q: I’m told it was the COP 26 summit which made you take more serious notice of climate change. Is your hope that, by presenting it like this, more people will pay attention to the issues of climate change and what the future could hold? Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate Younger’s death, but he has other plans as well as the investigation in mind. He has plans to have conversations with his estranged daughter who is based in the remote Highland village.