A discovery in frozen Scotland changes everything.

Author Peter May has a knack for taking society’s current situations and extrapolating them to the future. In 2005, May could not find a publisher for his book “Lockdown,” set in the midst of a devastating global pandemic, but it became a best seller in 2020 as readers struggled with that very issue. Now, in “A Winter Grave,” he gives readers a glimpse into life in 2053 – the good and the bad, the different and the same.

“A Winter Grave” opens with a prologue, an inciting incident that sets everything into motion. It is a winter day; the air is a crystal-clear blue; the sun spreads golden rays on the land below, and a woman is checking a weather sensors station. Then, in the frozen landscape, she finds something that changes her life forever.

Camron Brody is a Glasgow Detective. May paints a clear, poetic, and tragic picture of the wreck of a man he has become, but several things in his life are also about to change. Readers follow him as he conducts the investigation in the present and also delve deeply into his past, learning how he got to his troubled present. However, his “present” is 2051, and his “past” is 2023.

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.

May tells a superbly well-crafted story. The narrative expertly transitions back and forth in time. The plot is compelling and complex; the characters are complicated and authentic; the emotions are intricate and raw. It is uncanny and compelling in every way.

“A Winter Grave” by Peter May is now available in print, as an e-book, and on audio from independent bookstores, online booksellers, retail stores, public libraries, and anywhere you get your books.
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What can you expect from a Peter May novel? A rugged Scottish landscape, a dour detective with a troubled past, a plot that uses tangled family relationships to drive a pacey mystery, and epically bad weather. A WINTER GRAVE ticks all the boxes, and adds one that is unexpected: The story takes place in 2051, after the climate catastrophe, ignored for too long, has altered the landscape, inundating large parts of now-independent Scotland where water taxis ply the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow and it never seems to stop raining.

Detective Cameron Brodie is in a very dark mood. Not only has he been humiliated on the stand, when a sophisticated deepfake video contradicted CCTV footage critical to a case, he's just been told by his doctor that he has advanced cancer. He has only six months to live. When a case comes up that requires a trip to a remote western village, he decides to volunteer. As an avid hillclimber he has scaled most of Scotland's mountains, including the one where a missing investigative journalist's body has been discovered. More importantly, taking this assignment will give him a chance to try, once more, to reconcile with his daughter, a climate activist who discovered the reporter's frozen body in an ice cave when visiting a mountaintop weather station. She has long blamed Brodie for her mother's suicide, and he has things he wants to tell her before he dies.

Brodie needs to find out why the journalist was nosing around the massive nuclear plant located near the village and how he ended up frozen in the ice on a nearby mountain. Soon strange events add to the mystery: the recovered body vanishes from the hotel cooler where it's been stored, and that's just the start, requiring every ounce of Brodie's strength. His physical endurance is, at times, a bit superhuman, but his adventures give readers a bracing perspective as the tension ratchets up. More bodies will fall before the case is solved, and Brodie himself will confront death on a tighter schedule than his six-month prognosis.

This fast-paced mystery starts out dark and gloomy, but picks up energy as Brodie heads west, through wild weather, to the kind of setting that May has made his signature. The rugged and challenging landscape is used to good effect, balancing futuristic elements with the enduring power of the natural world. Those familiar with the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh will likely find the fast-forward fascinating (and disturbing) as May overlays a familiar map with sea-rise predictions, but apart from occasional explanations of how the world has changed, this is no dystopian tract; it's rather a conventional thriller embedded in an unusual and thought-provoking setting.

Reposted from Reviewing the Evidence

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow DI assigned to investigate the death of a man found in a frozen ice floe near the small village of Kinlochleven. He has his own issues, but he takes advantage of the situation because he needs to see someone in the village.
The first thing to note is that this book takes place in 2051. I don't think I've ever read a thriller/murder mystery that takes place in the future, but Mr. May does a tremendous job in incorporating futuristic items without making the book too Sci-Fi. Climate change has affected the world: the equator is too hot, so millions are moving north, the Gulf Stream has changed, which is making Scotland into a wintry wonderland, and oceans have risen, wiping out land masses along shores. His descriptions of the changes along the River Clyde in Glasgow and then in Loch Leven impressed me as I'm familiar with both areas and could visualize the impact of the changing weather.
The story is also good, which one would expect of the author of the Lewis trilogy. I don't want to spoil it because there are a lot of twists and turns, but it's a book that kept me reading to find out what happens next. As you'd expect with a book on the subject of climate change, there are political ramifications also. While I wouldn't say I liked it as much as some of his other books, it's a quick read and still very good. ( )