Peter May (1) (1951–)

I came to Peter May via his rather bleak "Lewis" trilogy, with a dour Hebridean detective returning to his home island and uncovering dark deeds. It all seemed so authentically Scottish that I couldn't really imagine him writing anything else.

Then I discovered that, more than a decade earlier, he'd written a set of thrillers set in China in the late nineties, in which none of the characters are Scottish. I was intrigued, picked up a copy of "The Firemaker"and discovered a whole new side to show more Peter May.

In "The FIremaker", Peter May shows great skill in merging genres and tropes to produce something new and interesting.

It has many of the hallmarks of a RomCom; a cute-meet between the two principals that set them at odds, a plot that keeps forcing them back together, and a finely paced set of will-they? won't-they? moments that stoke up the unresolved sexual tension in the best tradition of such things.

This is overlaid with massive culture clashes as the small, blonde, female American pathologist, running from her troubled past to her first assignment in China, meets ambitious and newly promoted Chinese Policeman who is dedicated to his work and wants to help build the new China.

Wrap all of that around political intrigue and a set of gruesome murders that seem connected but make no sense together and you have the makings of a very good book indeed.

This was the art of the exotic thriller being practiced at its best. The resarch was used to add an authentic sens of place without ending up feeling like a lecture on China and its recent history. Neither the American nor the Chinese culture walks away unscathed or undefenced. The people seem real and the plot unfolds with enough surprises to keep me turning the pages. The ending... well see for yourself. It works but is perhaps more RomCOm than Thriller.

I'cw already downloaded the next book in the series and hope to be returing to Peter May's China very soon. show less

The Blackhouse begins as an interesting Scottish (like the Irish, a genre unto themselves) police procedure novel, which evolves into a complex study in character, and concludes as a well-wrought thriller.

Peter May is an excellent writer, and the setting of this book (the northernmost of the Outer Hebrides Islands of Scotland - a “godforsaken bloody place”) alone makes it worth reading. My wife and I have been to Scotland twice and have been exposed to Gaelic (pronounced in Scotland as show more “Gahlik”) culture and language. May replicates the atmosphere exactly as we remember experiencing it. He also includes a map and a pronunciation guide for the Gaelic names in the story.

A gruesome murder is committed on the Isle of Lewis that seems like it might be related to a similar murder on the mainland. Thus, Detective Sergeant Finlay (Fin) Macleod of the Edinburgh police force, who grew up on that remote island and left it 18 years before, is sent to Lewis from Edinburgh to investigate. Both the setting and the murder victim bring back traumatic events that still give Macleod nightmares, forcing him to come to grips both with what happened to him in the past, and what is happening now on this desolate island.

Rather than spoil the plot, which contains a number of nice twists and surprises along with a very satisfying conclusion, I recommend you get and read the book yourself.

Evaluation: This fine example of “Tartan Noir” won a number of literary awards; I could see why. It is the first of a series of three books, and although it works perfectly well as a standalone, I intend to continue with the series.

(JAB) show less

Much more than run-of-the-mill 'tartan noir' pulp fiction, this is certainly page-turning, unputdownable, plot-driven etc., but, more than all that, it is also a novel of real sensitivity and subtlety.

The landscape of the western isles is evoked with love, and their geography, physical and psychological, more integral to characters and action than the usual bolt-on pathetic fallacy stuff we find so often elsewhere.

The central character, Fin Macleod, lives for the reader, a hard yet show more sympathetic ex-cop driven more now by family and his own broken past than by mere professional duty.

Peter May's finest achievement, though, and it is very fine, is his portrait of Tormod Macdonald, through whom much of the novel is filtered, the past with pin-sharp clarity, the present more faultingly, as he descends into dementia. His embodiment of the book's wider themes of memory, loss, eternity and the corrosive quality of time itself I found deeply moving.

Sometimes I feel like claiming my 20p back; on this occasion I feel guilty for not having paid the full £7-99.

I haven't yet read the others in the Lewis Trilogy, but by the time you've seen this, I will have done! show less

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: "Five of us had run away that fateful night just over a month before. Only three of us would be going home. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again."

Glasgow, 1965. Headstrong teenager Jack Mackay has just one destination on his mind--London--and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow bandmates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.

Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay, heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old show more is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life.

London, 2015. A man lies dead in a one-room flat. His killer looks on, remorseless.

What started with five teenagers following a dream five decades before has been transformed over the intervening decades into a waking nightmare that might just consume them all.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. IN 2015. AM I EMBARRASSED OR WHAT.

My Review: Aging. Yuck. No one really likes it...prostate pees for men, hot flashes for women, a general sense of "oh why bother" when confronted with la crise du jour...suddenly all those Godard films you watched to impress that cute guy make sense, ennui is one's default state.

But there are a few who, for whatever (usually external) reason, decide that this just Will Not Do. They put on their velcro-close "running shoes" (ha! like they're ever gonna run absent a fire alarm or a closing buffet) and say, "fuck this I'm outta here." In fact there's quite a little subgenre of books about old folk running away: those Swedish ones by that boring man, what was his name, anyway you know the ones I mean; long ago, Paul Gallico wrote one, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, and then M from the Bond movies was in that English one set in India...Marigold Something.

We are decidedly not, however, in any of those cute-old-folk entertainments here.

There are secrets in all our pasts. We don't tell others because they're too personal, or too painful, or too embarrassing...rare is the secret, though, that has cost lives in two centuries. Jack Mackay has one of those.

In 1965, Jack and four friends were about to defy the odds and Be Someone. Rise to their personal heights! They had to get the hell away from the dank chains of family, of course, and the mildewy environs of Glasgow. London! Music was happenin' in 1965 London! And they had what it takes, they were going there to build better than their small-time successes.

Tragedy. Humiliation. Homegoing, for some anyway. Jack spends fifty years being, well, nobody and everybody. Mediocre, an almost-was whose life has dragged on and on. Now more changes are being forced on Jack, his awful absence of success is revisiting him with its wet shroudlike envelopment. And suddenly, from the depths of 1965, the Jack of 2015 takes off back to London, his grandson at the wheel, because the siren call of unfinished business is LOUD.

The awful part is that finishing up that business could get people killed. Jack wouldn't be arsed if it was him whose "life" was the only one in danger, but the threat includes his old friends. And his grandson.

I must say that the indentity of the perpetrator of the coercive and criminal scenarios made all the sense in the world to me, and the nature of the disaster in the past was very deeply sad if not terribly unusual. The pure-D unadulterated Peter-May-ness of the resolution to the disasters past and present stems from his utter, abject inability to leave a thread to dangle. Every last end is tightly bound up.

Since Author May is a veteran of the TV mills and decades of thriller- and mystery-writing, he's developed that habit of story-telling and be damned if you, reviewer, wish for something a bit more textured, true to life. As this particular novel is a standalone and is based in part on some of the author's own lived experience, well...maybe it's all down to that specialty of the old, the tidying-up of the past.

I *do* know that, in spite of taking a thoroughly humiliating six years to write this review, I approve of the story, polished and tidied into fiction though it may be. show less