If a setting can be a character, the Isle of Lewis--an island off the north-west coast of Scotland, would be dark and broody and be given to moments of taciturnity. He would give glowering looks and have tempestuous relationships with others. Much like last year's reading of The Blackhouse, Peter May's The Lewis Man is an exceptionally well-done crime novel. It's the second in a trilogy of books set in this unforgiving landscape and continuing the story of ex-detective Fin Macleod who has returned to his childhood home after the death of his son and a failed marriage in Edinburgh. There is a saying that you can't go home again. Maybe you can, but it might be ghosts of your former life that greet you.
The Blackhouse tells Fin's story--his youth and upbringing, the death of his parents and subsequent life with an emotionally distant aunt. Mostly it tells of his coming of age--a true trial by fire that resulted in the death of someone close. And wrapped up in it is a murder investigation that Fin becomes embroiled in. The Lewis Man picks up where the first book left off, bringing back many of the same characters, scarred and unhappy after the events in the first book. Fin has decided to return to his former home on the island, now little more than a ruin that he sets out to repair, and again gets caught up in a murder investigation. Once more it involves someone close to him, but now he must pursue the truth outside the boundaries of the law.
When a body is discovered in a peat bog the assumption is it dates back centuries. A tattoo of Elvis on the arm of the corpse, however, places him firmly in a more recent past. His identity is unknown but there is evidence he is in some way related to the father of Fin's former lover, Marsaili. The family asks Fin to look into the matter before detectives from the mainland arrive as they will surely turn first to Tormod Macdonald for answers being the primary suspect. Tormod, however, is elderly and in a fragile state. The Lewis Man tells his story.
It's not too much of a stretch, I think, to consider this a sort of 'locked room' mystery. Tormod Macdonald has dementia. He is wrapped up in his own memories, which are fragmentary at best. Whatever happened in his youth may well now long be forgotten. Although the reader lives inside his mind, things do not easily connect up, and it's only glimpses of his past that are seen. It's through these glimpses that the story of his youth are pieced together and the mystery is slowly unlocked. The story builds to a feverish pace, and while the solution isn't necessarily a surprise, the telling of the story is skillfully done and quite adept.
There is once again more than one story being told here, but the threads are tightly woven together and almost seamless since Fin and Marsaili's relationship comes to the forefront of the story. Their lives, like those of the other islanders, are so intermingled that they become a compact whole. Whatever their relationship now, they have ties to one another that can't be undone or easily broken.
The body found in the bog was murdered, his throat slit, with all the signs of revenge. Just as the island itself is unforgiving, situated as it is facing the cold north seas and being battered by the elements, so too are the lives of the islanders often grim and unforgiving, too. There is a religious aspect to the story as well, and while faith and religion should be a safe harbor for its followers, here it takes on dark overtones. Tormod's youth was not a happy one, and all the truths that Marsaili thought she knew, turn out to be mostly fabrications.
Just like last year's The Blackhouse, I'd barely turned the last page of The Lewis Man before ordering the final instalment in Peter May's trilogy, The Chessmen. I'm not even sure what the story is about, but I know I like May's writing and so will happily read it and prefer not to know to much about the story beforehand. The stories are wonderfully atmospheric. The isolation and harshness of island life is both a little scary and very fascinating to me. I love solitude, but I wonder if life in such a forbidding place would be too much. I'm quite curious about the folklore of the place. One of the clues to the mystery is the imprint from a blanket on the body. Every family would have had a particular design used in sweaters that the women would have knitted that I would like to learn more about. Perhaps I will learn more when my copy (and end of the year splurge) of Hebrides arrives. It is a "photographic journey through the Hebridean islands" as narrated by Peter May. It will be nice to have visuals to go along with the stories.
Although my mystery reading will soon take a "vintage" turn, I would like to return to this sort of a setting, if not the Hebrides in particular, then a locale oozing with atmosphere (maybe it's time to get back to Elly Grffith's books or Yrsa Sigurdardottir's). I recently discovered A.D. Scott and North Sea Requiem found a place in my last library haul, but I think I would prefer to begin with her first book, A Small Death in the Great Glen. As my reading stacks are slowly being cleared, it's definitely time to settle on a new mystery (or two) to kick off the new year with.