A Winter Grave: a chilling new mystery set in the Scottish highlands

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And it was the French version that was read by the book scout for award-winning young publishing house Quercus – a UK publisher that had not even existed when the book was first offered to British publishers. They immediately stepped in to buy the English language rights and were the ones to commission a further two books to create what has become known as The Lewis Trilogy. Apart from being based in the Oriental land of China, the China Thriller series starts with an interesting take on murder mysteries by adding a hint of romance. My job was to grasp the basic principles, and makes them easily understood by a popular readership. Joe walked me through the complexities, enabling me to do just that. With great forbearance he answered all my silly questions, and spelled out for me with great clarity exactly how genetic modification works.

Joe went on to advise me on further books in the China series, as well as in the Enzo Files series, and finally on “ Coffin Road”.But how do you write about a subject so big and I’m a crime writer and readers don’t want to be preached at and I was well aware of all that.

The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable. Enzo Macleod is a biology teacher at a French University. Macleod grew up in Scotland and worked as a forensic scientist. He is married and has a daughter as well. He lives a simple, routine life with not much happening, but he is happy with what he does. Maybe if bestselling Scottish thriller writer Peter May hadn’t started reading around climate change and its effects in the run-up to COP26, he would never have written his new book set in the future. The new book, Peter May's A Winter Grave is set in a world affected by climate change. So I wrestled with the idea of how would I write about this in a way that would draw attention to it. He added: “We have so little time left to save our world, and I wanted to give everyone the chance to express themselves in a song we can all sing, a song that might just make a difference. Particularly for the children, since this is the world the rest of us will be leaving them.”

Strangely, many of the things I have written about during a long career in TV and books have subsequently come to pass. In my early years, while storylining the Scottish soap opera “Take The High Road”, there was a sequence of spooky occurrences. I wrote about a character falling and breaking his arm. Three weeks later that actor fell from a ladder and broke his arm. In another story I wrote about a character becoming pregnant. The actress became pregnant. There was a lot of nervous laughter about it among the cast. Actors hoped I wasn’t going to kill off their character – and not just because of loss of earnings. I had an actor come to my door once and ask if I could write a story in which his character won the lottery. I went to the homes of some of their descendants and met some very elderly ladies in their late eighties and nineties who still speak Gaelic. They spoke of their pride in their roots, and in the fortitude of their ancestors who had survived and thrived against all the odds. Effectively I had decided that I was finished, that I was retiring. People said to me ‘Writers can’t retire, you’ll always want to write!’,” Peter laughed. While I was in Brest, the Cannes Film Festival was taking place and I wasn’t able to be there for the official announcement that a deal had finally been confirmed to make The Killing Room– the third of my China Thrillers – into a movie. Alexis Dantec and Fred Bellaiche’s production company, French Connection, optioned the rights to The Killing Room two years ago, but getting past the Chinese censors was posing a problem for them. The answer proved to be an unusual one: the company has decided to transpose the novel’s original setting of Shanghai and Beijing to Seoul, Li Yan will become a Korean cop and Margaret Campbell will become a French pathologist!

Wu He Peng had been appointed to this job as reward for catching four notorious criminals who had been robbing museums of priceless artefacts and smuggling them out of the country. One of the first things he did in his new job was make an eight-hour drama based on that investigation. He wrote it, produced it, and starred in it as himself, bringing him instant fame throughout China where the average nightly television audience is 500 million. It’s quite a departure from Peter’s regular genre of writing, though his crime books – particularly his standalones – have always taken his readers to different places and ways of life many people might not have encountered before. One victim is a journalist, the other a Cabinet Minister: the double-assassination witnessed by the former’s autistic daughter. This girl recalls every detail about her father’s killer – except for one. In the last 100 years, Britain has won two gold medals in Olympic Curling. British basketball has won none. I am not suggesting that as a reason for de-funding British basketball, but it places Godwin’s ludicrous logic in its proper perspective.I know a lot of people are pleased that I’m making a return to the Western Isles, and readers of the Lewis Trilogy will be happy to know that there will be at least one familiar face. Detective Sergeant George Gunn’s services are required when the dead body of a man is found near the lighthouse on the Flannan Isles. Enzo does not know that as he leads the investigation, he is getting closer to the killer, putting his own life in danger. There is a lot of action, thrill, and humor in this book and the entire series. The Lewis Trilogy

George was a much-loved personality in the Lewis Trilogy, with his humour, his compassion and his strong moral code. A warm-hearted and decent man, he always felt the need to do the right thing, even if that meant he had to interpret the rules in a very flexible way to accommodate his actions. The new set-up was so successful that the interviews and book talks continued into April and that’s when things became very complicated.

Dagger in the Library

There might be some confusion about the title of this book. The original title of this book was “Extraordinary People.” Still, it was published under the title “Dry Bones” in the US. So it does not matter which book you choose, everything is the same except the name. The Lewis Man was shortlisted for the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year, at the inaugural “Bloody Scotland” Crime Writing Festival in Stirling in September – a great festival, well-run, superb location, convivial – hope it’s the first of many! Coffin Road was published in October 2016 and I’m pleased to say that during 2017 publication dates will come into alignment with the UK, so that by January 2018 books will be published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. In May, I made the final shortlist for the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s “Dagger in the Library” a prize awarded by British librarians.