Tag Archives: Peter May

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Black Loch,’ by Peter May

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Peter May is an excellent novelist with a gift for scenic description. I’ve read a number of his novels with great pleasure. I think he may be trying to lose me as a reader now, but more about that below.

Fin Macleod, hero of The Black Loch, is a native of the Isle of Lewis, a former policeman now employed as a civilian in the city (I forget which city), doing computer forensics on cases of child pornography. The job is nearly killing him.

Then he learns his son has been arrested for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl, back home at Stornaway on Lewis.

Years before, as a detective, Fin had returned to Stornaway when an old friend (married to Fin’s old girlfriend) was murdered. In his investigations, he learned that that friend’s son was not actually his, but Fin’s own. Fin ended up marrying the former girlfriend and getting to know Fionnlach, his new-found son.

Fionnlach had stayed in Stornaway and taught school there. Now one of his female students is dead, and it turns out Fionnlach had been having an adulterous affair with her. Her body was found floating in the Black Loch, marked by signs of rape. A witness saw Fionnlach fight with her on a cliff and knock her over the edge.

Fin drops his work and, together with his wife, travels to Stornaway to see what’s wrong. Their son won’t talk to them; he talks as if he’s guilty. The townspeople have already made up their minds.

Fin asks questions, mostly of old friends. The community has many secrets (for one thing, a lot of the young people seem to be the children of different men from their legal fathers). But one person in particular has deadly secrets to hide, at any cost.

There was much to enjoy in The Black Loch. I love the Scottish Isles, and Author May brings them and their people to dramatic life. The dialogue was very good, though Americans will have a little trouble with the dialect – as well as a lot of trouble pronouncing names (though a pronunciation guide is included).

My problems with the book were mostly personal. The depictions of the church were uniformly negative – though Fin makes it clear that he mainly dislikes the present minister, whom he knows to be a hypocrite, every mention of the church always includes some comment on how grim and barren and comfortless Calvinism is. As a Lutheran I can sympathize somewhat, but I thought he overdid it.

There’s also the political element. In this book and the previous May book I read, he made the choice to go full-on environmentalist. He seems to believe – no doubt sincerely – that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the planet.

The problem with this is that you end up with the old “Law & Order” cliché. If a certain type of character appears, you can always be sure that they’re going to be the culprit. Sad to say, that predictability was front and center in The Black Loch.

When all is said and done, The Black Loch is a good novel, but (in my opinion) the author is selling his birthright for a pot of message.

A criticism which (obviously) more than applies to me, too.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Winter Grave,’ by Peter May

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And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

What do you say about a book that was well-written, one which you enjoyed, when you believe that book to be effectively (if unintentionally) in the service of evil? That’s my problem with Peter May’s A Winter Grave.

Actually it’s not that big a problem. The answer is to tell the truth and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

The year is 2051, and climate catastrophe has struck the earth. The tropics are uninhabitable now, and the loss of the Gulf Stream has turned Scotland into a subarctic wasteland. Addie Sinclair, a weather monitor, climbs a mountain near Loch Leven to check her equipment and discovers the body of a man, frozen in the ice.

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow police detective. When his superior tells him to go up to the village of Kinlochleven to investigate, he begs off at first. He explains, truthfully, that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will be retiring from the force. But when he hears Addie Sinclair’s name he changes his mind, saying it was a false alarm. Because Addie is his own daughter, from whom he has been alienated a long time.

Cam boards an electronic, self-piloting helicopter with a friendly forensic scientist. But when they arrive, murder quickly follows, and Cam is soon fighting for his life in the midst of blizzards, while trying to find a way to explain to his daughter – after all these years – the real cause of her mother’s death.

Peter May is one of the best mystery writers out there, and A Winter Grave showcases all his virtues. The prose is excellent, the characters interesting, the setting vivid, the mystery confounding.

But it’s all in the service of the Green religion. The message of this book, when you get down to it, is, “Wake up! If you don’t surrender all your liberties to the government without delay, so they can implement draconian regulations on every area of your life, future generations will be cursed, and it will be all your fault.” It’s a fascist book, though I’m confident the author is a true believer and intends nothing of the sort.

One thing I found ironic was the book’s depiction of the Green movement as a beleaguered, embattled little cause with diminishing political power, rejected even by the news media.

I can only dream.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Runaway,’ by Peter May

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But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgment upon me ahead of the grave.

It’s not often I encounter a book that’s not only different from what I expected it to be, but wonderfully different. I expected Peter May’s Runaway to be yet another Baby Boomer paeon to the “glories” of the Swinging 60s. It is no such thing. Far from it.

Jack Mackay is a resident of Edinburgh, a man dwindling into old age. He has been edged out of his house by his daughter’s family and installed in a nursing home. He’s consumed with regrets over an unsuccessful life, over sins committed, dreams unfulfilled, and opportunities thrown away.

Then he’s summoned by an old friend, Maurice Cohen, who was lead singer of the band they were in together in their teens. In 1965, aged 17, they “ran away” to London, to be rock stars like the Beatles. Instead they experienced violence, victimization, and a peripheral connection with a famous celebrity murder.

Maurie is in the terminal stages of cancer now; not much time left. He shows Jack a newspaper story, telling how the man accused of the celebrity murder, who disappeared at the time, has now been found murdered. Maurie says the man was not guilty. He himself knows who did it, and they have an obligation to go to London and set things right.

It sounds insane, but Maurie doesn’t have much time left, and Jack feels a personal debt. They collect Dave, one of the other surviving band members, and dragoon Jack’s couch potato grandson, Ricky, into driving them. They set off on a ridiculous, ill-planned pilgrimage, retracing the route of their ridiculous, ill-planned “escape” 50 years before. Along the way we follow two parallel accounts – Jack’s own first-person memoir of the original trip, and a third-person account of their present 2015 journey. We will learn the source of Jack’s guilt, and the secret Maurie has been hoarding all these years, leading up to an explosive conclusion.

 I have no idea what Peter May believes. I suspect that, like most sensible modern people, he probably wouldn’t care much for my beliefs. But I have to say that I have rarely encountered a better description of sin and guilt – from the human point of view – than I found in Runaway. It amazed and moved me.

This is no CBA novel. Cautions for very adult themes. But I highly recommend Runaway to adult readers.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Night Gate,’ by Peter May

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I had actually thought that Peter May had wrapped up his Enzo Macleod mystery series with the previous installment. But Enzo rides one more time (if a little gingerly) in The Night Gate, which is advertised as the series finale.

Enzo, a Scotsman resident in France, has slowed down since the last book. He’s 65 now, and constantly on guard against the Covid-19 virus. He’s retired as a forensic science teacher and consultant, but when a skeleton is uncovered in the roots of a fallen tree in a picturesque town in the French Pyrenees, and that skeleton is dressed in the remains of a German officer’s uniform, the skull containing a bullet hole, Enzo is asked to take a look. He travels to the town with Dominique, his wife, and notices crime tape across the door of the house next door. There has been a murder there recently – a prominent art critic died inside of a slashed throat – but the local police ask Enzo to give them the benefit of his expertise. Though the culprit seems to be obvious – a German art broker was seen fleeing the crime scene covered in blood.

Enzo, however, is not sure about the man’s guilt. As he looks into the history of the murder house, he discovers that a former resident was involved in an audacious scheme to protect no less an artwork than the Mona Lisa, during World War II. A series of flashbacks tell us the story of Georgette Pignal, a young woman tasked by General de Gaulle himself with substituting a perfect copy for the original.

The Night Gate provided an enjoyable ride, relating a harrowing World War II adventure, along with the present-day heroics of a hero somewhat diminished by age and quarantine. I was left unsatisfied at the end, though – the resolution of the mystery was kind of a downer, and the extra surprise at the end was ambivalent.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ll want to read this one to cap things off. If you haven’t, this isn’t the place to start.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Silent Death,’ by Peter May

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Through the window of his taxi, he watched rain-streaked red sandstone tenements drift past, the colour leeched from them somehow by lack of light, like watching a black-and-white movie of his childhood spool by.

Peter May excels at creating interesting protagonists for his novels. He’s given us another winner (at least for this reader) in John Mackenzie, hero of A Silent Death. Mackenzie is a policeman with issues – highly intelligent but utterly lacking in interpersonal skills. Kind of like Monk, or Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes (in fact, Cumberbatch would be a good casting choice if this book is ever filmed). He made himself unwelcome at the Metropolitan Police, and now works for the National Crime Agency, not a step up career-wise.

It’s as much to get rid of him as anything else that his boss sends him to Spain, to collect a criminal being extradited. Only when he arrives, he finds that the criminal, a murderer and drug dealer named Jack Cleland, has escaped. This fact is of particular, urgent concern to Spanish officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell, who is tasked with meeting and escorting Mackenzie. Jack Cleland blames Cristina for the death of his fiancée, and has vowed to take his revenge on her – by targeting her husband, her son, and her blind-and-deaf-aunt, Ana.

As Mackenzie applies his considerable brain to the problem of where Cleland might be hiding, Cleland kidnaps Ana. Surprisingly, an odd relationship gradually rises between the two outsiders, as Mackenzie also learns a few things about being human from Cristina.

Silent Death was engrossing, poignant and exciting. I rate this book very high. Occasional references to religion are not positive, but are fair from the characters’ point of view. 

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cast Iron,’ by Peter May

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Cast Iron

Here we have the final novel in Peter May’s Enzo Macleod mystery series. Years ago, Enzo, a forensic scientist, made a bet that he could solve a series of famous French cold cases described in a book written by a friend. Two cases are left, but they’ll both be unraveled by the end of Cast Iron.

In 1989, 20-year-old Lucie Martin was murdered, her body hidden in a lake. In 2003, due to a drought, the body was uncovered and examined. The skeleton had a broken hyoid bone, a sign of strangulation. Suspicion settled on a pimp named Regis Blanc, who had been convicted of strangling three prostitutes, and who had been dating Lucie. But he had a “cast iron” alibi.

In 2011, Enzo Macleod turns his attention to the Lucie Martin case. He thinks there’s more to the matter than earlier investigators guessed. And – intriguingly – he discovers a link to a previous murder he solved, though he wasn’t able to identify the person who paid for that murder for hire. This he will learn in Cast Iron. And clearly he’s getting too close to the truth for somebody, because a threat of violence is directed at someone near and dear to him.

As I mentioned in my last review, Enzo has grown in character through the series. I still don’t entirely like him, and I don’t think he’s ever really taken responsibility for some of his sins against others. But he’s better than he was, and this book brings the series to a satisfying conclusion. Three narrative threads are actually tied up at the end. Two I saw coming, but one came right out of left field and was an entertaining surprise.

Recommended, with cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blowback,’ by Peter May

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Blowback

Peter May’s Enzo Macleod mysteries are growing on me, mainly because Enzo himself is growing. Enzo is a Scottish criminologist living and working in France. He has made a bet that he can solve seven famous unsolved French murders, and he’s working his way systematically through the list. Blowback is the fifth in the series, and this one takes him into the rarefied world of French haute cuisine.

Seven years ago, chef Marc Fraysse, who operated a three star (the highest rating in the prestigious Michelin Guide) restaurant in a remote French village, was murdered just when rumors were circulating that he was going to lose a star. Enzo travels to the village, where he meets an attractive local police woman who eagerly helps him with his inquiries (a pleasant surprise). He goes to stay at the restaurant/hotel, where the victim’s brother and widow make him generally welcome. But Enzo doesn’t trust them entirely, and has insinuated a personal spy into the staff.

Meanwhile, Enzo realizes that some tensions and feuds in the victim’s history echo broken relationships of his own – notably with a half-brother he never mentions to anyone, and the son he fathered with a woman who demanded he have no contact with the child. Hopefully he will find or make some second chances, and not succumb to the errors that brought Marc Fraysse down before his time.

I found Enzo Macleod kind of superficial when I started reading the books. I’m gratified to see him growing with each installment, becoming more and more a grownup and increasingly controlling his passions. I enjoyed Blowback. It also got pretty suspenseful toward the end.

Recommended with cautions for adult stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Freeze Frame,’ by Peter May

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Freeze Frame

This is the last book in the Enzo Mysteries series that is currently available for Kindle.

In Freeze Frame, police forensic expert Enzo Macleod, who lives and operates in France, takes up a cold case involving the murder of an English citizen shot to death 20 years earlier in his home on an island off the Brittany coast.

This book departs from the series’ usual protocols. Enzo is on his own this time, not surrounded by his supportive team of two daughters, their boyfriends, and his female assistant. And this story assumes the form of a classic, “cozy” puzzle mystery. The murder victim had asked, before he died, that his study be preserved exactly as he left it, until his son returned. His son, he said, would immediately understand certain clues he’d left. Unfortunately, the son died before ever seeing the murder scene. His (the son’s) widow has preserved the study untouched ever since. It’s Enzo’s challenge to decipher a puzzle involving secrets and private jokes shared by two men long dead.

I liked Enzo a little more in Freeze Frame than I did in the previous books. He actually exercises some sexual restraint this time out, and a personal challenge that confronts him finds him taking what I consider the right side on a controversial issue.

I’d read the next Enzo book if the Kindle version were available, but for now I’ll be patient. Recommended, with cautions for what you’d expect.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blacklight Blue,’ by Peter May

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Blacklight Blue

I kind of cooled to Peter May’s Enzo Macleod mystery series after the last volume I reviewed. But I picked the thread up again with Blacklight Blue. I’m pleased to report that some of the quirks that annoyed me in previous books have been moderated, and I enjoyed the book well enough.

This time out, Enzo has just gotten a diagnosis of terminal cancer from a doctor, when (in short succession) one of his daughters is nearly killed by a bomb, his other daughter’s boyfriend’s business is burned down, and all his credit cards are stopped.

It all seems to relate to the latest in his cold case investigations. A former forensic scientist, Enzo has made it his crusade, based on a bet, to clear up a number of unsolved French murders (though Scottish-Italian, Enzo lives in Paris). His investigation of the murder of a “rent boy” takes him (along with his usual entourage – his daughters, their boyfriends, and his female assistant) to the Auvergne region of France, where he faces a relentless enemy and a deadly confrontation on a mountainside.

I was pleased that the earlier, half-comic theme of Enzo’s devastating attractiveness to every women he meets has been downplayed. This time out he limits himself to a sympathetic female ski instructor who provides his party with a convenient hideout.

My enjoyment of these books is reduced by the fact that I don’t actually find Enzo a very appealing character. Yet I keep reading the books, so it can’t be that bad. Peter May is a good writer.

Recommended. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Critic,’ by Peter May

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The Critic

This the second book in the Peter May mystery series starring Enzo MacLeod, who debuted as a character in Extraordinary People, which I reviewed earlier. I don’t think I like this series as much as I like May’s Hebrides novels, but he’s a good storyteller, and there’s plenty to enjoy in The Critic.

The critic of the title is Gil Petty, a prestigious American wine critic who disappeared on a working trip to the vineyards of the Gaillac region in France. His fate was unknown for a couple years, until one day his body appeared staked up like a scarecrow in a vineyard at harvest time. It had clearly been preserved in wine since his death.

Our hero, Enzo MacLeod, makes Gil Petty the next challenge in his missing persons bet. A friend has written a book about unsolved disappearances in France, and Enzo has made a bet with him that he can solve several of them. Enzo is a half-Italian Scotsman, but has lived in France for years, teaching his specialty, forensic science.

Enzo moves into a small cottage near a chalet, and in semi-comic fashion nearly his whole circle of amateur assistants gather around him uninvited – his daughter and her body-builder boyfriend, his young, sexy assistant, and his on-and-off girlfriend. Another drop-in is the estranged, beautiful daughter of the late Mr. Petty, from America.

Enzo is hampered by the suspicion of some of the growers, and by constant sexual tension with almost every female (except his daughter) with whom he comes into contact. Enzo’s attractiveness to women is played mostly for laughs, and it causes him more problems than any satisfaction he gets.

But the mystery is serious, and Gil Petty is not the last victim of a ruthless serial killer.

Like all Peter May mysteries, The Critic is pretty good entertainment. Cautions for language and adult situations. There are some hints of political views, but only in passing.