With a long list of grievances perpetrated against nearly every male member of the community and more than a few females, most everyone's a viable suspect, but then a brutish murder like this comes from more than just someone harboring a grievance.Īs Fin investigates the murder, trying to find a motive that would fit such a crime, he also finds himself sifting through the debris of his own memories, his own failings, and those he hurt the worst as he flailed to adulthood. There is no one from Fin’s past who inspires more terror wrapped nightmares than Angel Macritchie. The irony is that he is going back to investigate the murder of Angel Macritchie, who despite his name was certainly no Angel.

In some ways, you never escape the fallacies of your youth, when everyone’s memory is so long. When you grow up in a small community, they remember everything you’ve ever done: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The sorrows and desperations of his current life outweigh the dread of dredging up memories of his unhappy childhood. The tender threads that held his marriage together with Mona snapped with the tragic death of his son.

He had only come back to the island for the funeral of his aunt since he left to go to school in Glasgow, so everything there is tinged in the sepia tones of the past. The murder has similar characteristics of brutality to a murder he has been working on in Edinburgh. A murder has happened on the Isle of Lewis in The Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the very town Fin was from, Crobost. Easy to forget that as a teenager nothing had seemed more important to him than leaving.”ĭetective Fin Macleod is sent back to the place where he was bred, born, burnished, and raised as an orphan. How easy it was now to ignore the fact that he had spent most of his adult life avoiding just that. Back to a place where life had once seemed simple. “Knew, too, that it wasn’t just Mona he wanted to run away from. Peter May has crafted a page-turning murder mystery that explores the darkness in our souls, and just how difficult it is to escape the past. The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision. For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past.Įach year the island's men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality. When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge. The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people's fear of God.

The black house by peter may