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Peter kindly agreed to answer a few questions on what inspired him to write this futuristic “cli-fi” novel. There are multiple twists and turns throughout the novel which kept me on the edge of my seat, and an ending I never saw coming. Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland. Effectively I had retired,” he says. “I had turned down future contracts from my publisher. I had been doing a book or two books a year for 20 years or more and travelling, all over Europe and all over North America.
It’s exhausting, all my contemporaries were retiring so I thought, why can’t I retire? I wanted to read for pleasure and to get involved in music, which is the other big thing in my life.
The joy of research
The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger who has been missing for three months after going missing on a supposed walking holiday. Younger was no walker making his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven unexplainable.
Peter also looked into the possible transport of the future driven by electricity and green hydrogen produced by renewable energies, for example an eVTOL plane, plus icom mobiles. He used a specifically commissioned drone to explore the area high up above the loch he uses within A Winter Grave and used the footage from that within his story.Don’t Burn the World was written by Peter and Irish lyricist and poet Dennis McCoy. It is intended to be an anthem for the youth of the world and a plea for action in the face of the climate crisis. It is performed by the Peter May Band and was recorded at his home studio in France. Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village. The dead man is investigative reporter George Younger, who’d been missing for three months. What he’d been doing on a mountain top is a mystery, as those who knew him said he wasn’t an experienced hill walker at all. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Quercus Books via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of A Winter Grave by Peter May for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. fivestarread #crime #detectivefiction #dystopian #familydrama #murdermystery #mystery #smalltownfiction #thriller #suspense #scottishnoir
While initially these threads may have felt a bit disparate, they came to flow well together for me, filling in aspects of the story as and when needed for the sake of all the characters involved. May is expert at creating settings of all kinds, here majestic, beautiful, threatening, and deadly. He also can devise plots that are complex but are not overdone. He cares about his characters and makes them human. The three stories, of climate, of crime, of family, work out along side each other, though the climate story really hasn’t worked out at all! As Brodie investigates the death of a man found frozen in the ice of a snow tunnel, it becomes clear his enemy is not just the person or persons responsible for the man’s death but the weather as well. Ferocious storms have become a frequent occurrence for the residents of Kinlochleven, resulting in power cuts and the loss of communications with the outside world for days at a time. Venturing out into a particularly violent storm, Brodie witnesses the extreme weather conditions for himself. ‘He seemed to be driving headlong into the gale. Hailstorms flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the windscreen… He could barely see the road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow on the recently cleared tarmac.’ A good read but I think it was more about me not getting absorbed by the novel than it not been a good book. I have always enjoyed this authors writing and even though I wasn’t fully convinced by this novel I still enjoyed it. And Brodie is determined to take what may be his last opportunity to tell his daughter what he has been silent about for the ten years since her mother’s death. A Winter Grave is not an easy read; the near future is quite bleak so to say, in more than one meaning. It is, however, a great dystopian thriller which will set you thinking.A Winter Grave takes place in the not-too-distant future, in 2051. It begins with the discovery of the body of an investigative reporter. A Winter Grave isn’t the first time Peter has looked at the impacts of climate change in his writing, “I have always been interested in the environment and the planet and what we are doing to it,” he says “I wrote Coffin Road (2006) about the disappearance of the bees – at that point I am thinking this is a serious problem, and I want to write about it but how do you engage people?”
A: I chose Kinlochleven because it was a place I knew and loved. But it was also the perfect location for my story. And ideal for painting a picture of how our world might be transformed by climate change.In the autumn of 2021, Peter watched and read about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow with a growing sense of concern. Just three months earlier, the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published their scariest prediction yet: that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster. The climate crisis goes down and down and down the agenda so that it barely gets a mention – and yet it is the single most important thing facing the human race.
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