The author, Peter May, knows his turf, or peat, or sod, whatever. Suspects? Apparently the entire population of the Isle, presumably minus Fin Macleod, although the detective himself was no fan of Angel when growing up. The murder victim? The widely and long-despised Angel Macritchie. (The idea that a grieving father, whose marriage is also unraveling, is up to the task after only a month is a tad unbelievable.) As for the Isle of Lewis constabulary, other than some sympathetic underlings who take to the returning native son, they aren’t too thrilled to have an Edinburgh hotshot second-guessing them. Indeed, the detective’s assignment is an obvious ploy by his rather unsympathetic superiors to get his mind back on cop work. But police work soon takes a back seat to the flood of memories, some long-suppressed, that bedevil Fin, who is reeling from the tragic death of his eight-year-old child only a month earlier. True, the book’s protagonist, Fin Macleod, is an Edinburgh detective sent to investigate a brutal killing on the Isle of Lewis, the close-knit and hardscrabble Scottish community where he happened to be born. That’s not a fatal flaw, although it may present a problem for readers expecting either of those genres, and who may even feel misled by the publisher’s promotional material suggesting that The Black House is a police procedural. What The Black House isn’t: a true thriller or mystery. What The Black House is: well written, educational, innovative and character-driven.
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