Two detective inspectors from Glasgow, one of them recently back from sick leave (possibly too soon?) are sent to investigate a death on Eilean Eadar, a very tiny, very remote Scottish island. The island’s inhabitants have lived and fished there for generations, they aren’t welcoming to mainlanders, and they resent the fact that the only thing the island is known for is the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers a century before.
“This island has been populated on and off for millennia—did you know that?” she asks, her tone bitter. “Found tools in the ground dating back to the Iron Age. Pottery, too, and artifacts from when the first settlers from Ireland arrived here, and from later when the Vikings arrived. But you’ll never see us in the history books for all that. It’ll always just be that bloody story.”
DIs Georgina Lennox and Richard Stewart are there to discover if eighteen-year old Alan Ferguson’s fall from the top of that same lighthouse, now derelict, was suicide or perhaps something more deliberate, as some unexplained bruises on his arm might indicate. The local postmistress, Kathy McKinnon, is one of the few people who welcomes them with open arms, multiple pots of haddock chowder, and a curious determination to get George to solve the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers before even bothering with the more recent death. As time passes and the island’s residents become more hostile George begins to wonder if the disappearances in the past and the recent death are related, while Richie wonders if her recent on the job injuries are causing her to imagine things that aren’t there.
The writing is first rate, the setting will make you shiver when the wind blows in off the Atlantic which is almost all of the time, the plot is creepy enough for Alfred Hitchcock, dark enough for Raymond Chandler, and convoluted enough for Agatha Christie, and the denouement is horror itself.
What I find even more haunting is the resonance McCluskey’s tale finds with life off island as we live it today. She is writing about an insular, isolated community whose life and culture are handed down from the generations that came before them, which they step outside of at their literal peril. It’s like a closed Facebook page where the followers are bound by the strictures of common beliefs who will be ruthlessly doxxed should they dare to log out. The wood on the island is dark and deep but it is not lovely, and it is filled with secrets the islanders will do anything to keep hidden. Maybe have a mug of cocoa close to hand as you read.