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2000s: Do you dare to follow the Coffin Road. What will you find at the end?
Coffin Road
What you need to know before your trail
With this start, you just know this is going to be one heck of a trip to the Hebrides.
He does have a map however, a map tracing a trail of sorts along what is labelled ‘The Coffin Road”. The name fills him with a deep sense of foreboding and danger. He realises that he has to follow this trail in order to try and make sense of everything.
Across the waters of the Outer Hebrides, on the Flannan Isles, there is a remote rock where more than a century ago three lighthouse keepers disappeared. However there has been another death more recently…
And in Edinburgh, a daughter wants to solve the death of her father….
Travel Guide
No one does the Hebrides and the Isle of Harris like Peter May. The landscape, the legends, the sense of community v isolation and even in this book the flora and fauna in the depiction of the declining bee population. This is an island that comes to life under Peter’s pen. Evoked in words, this is an island where a man, having lost his memory, discovers that he is a writer and had been researching the mystery of three lighthouse keepers. With the recent murder on the island, the sense of foreboding and unease is heightened. The intrigue is washed up with death and murder, the beauty of the islands is mixed with the barren nature of the land. Isolation holds hands with a reluctant sense of community. The wind blows the pages as you travel along the Coffin Road. The wild beauty, the noise of the wind, the reckless waves, the rocky cliffs…
The real Coffin Road was a route where pallbearers would carry the dead from the Bays district over to the west side of Harris for burial on the machair ( a fertile low lying grassy plain)
With such a title, the image of death, coffins and the trail to the truth is evoked and set out with many surprising twists and turns along the way. Be careful to look out for the bees….
Streetview Maps
1) Isle of Harris - Luskentyre
2) The Coffin Road
Dare to start the journey?
Dare to start the journey?
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Ooh this was interesting! I always like Peter’s books but this one seemed so multilayered and the very idea that a writer researching a legend should actually be affected by it in this way was creepily good. The Hebrides and islands are awash with folklore and fiction and this was a great way to incorporate that into a gripping crime novel. It really got my research bug going and the very idea that I was going on a trail with the writer in the book was very exciting. The whole story was drip fed and so really builds up the tension and sense that you really have to know what is going on. The multiple locations too with links to past and present created an entire web of intrigue and left me wanting more. If you read this on the isle of harris, I would be seriously spooked!
The inclusion of the environment and the bees was a nice touch and I was pleasantly surprised with so many unusual ingredients in a crime novel with a difference.
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Twitter: @authorpetermay
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Web: petermay.co.uk
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