A detective is haunted by the feeling he knows his murder suspect – despite the fact they have never met.
IF YOU FLEE FATE…
When Detective Sime Mackenzie is sent from Montreal to investigate a murder on the remote Entry Island, 850 miles from the Canadian mainland, he leaves behind him a life of sleeplessness and regret.
FATE WILL FIND YOU…
But what had initially seemed an open-and-shut case takes on a disturbing dimension when he meets the prime suspect, the victim’s wife, and is convinced that he knows her – even though they have never met.
And when his insomnia becomes punctuated by dreams of a distant Scottish past in another century, this murder in the Gulf of St. Lawrence leads him down a path he could never have foreseen, forcing him to face a conflict between his professional duty and his personal destiny.
My Review
Sime Mackenzie is a lonely man. Since the breakup of his marriage, he has suffered sleep deprivation and regret. Now he has been assigned to a new investigation team sent to the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of the St Lawrence. As the only native English speaker amongst the other French speaking members of the Canadian team he leads interrogations, but the rest of the team are wary of him, especially as the crime scene investigator is his estranged wife Marie-Ange.
In parallel to the mysterious murder case are Sime’s dreams of the Highland Clearance which involved his Scottish ancestor. This alternating story is distressing but informative and for me it was the investigation and Sime’s mental breakdown which I found more compelling. The isolation of the close-knit community on Entry Island reflects the township on the coast of the Isle of Lewis and Harris where another Sime Mackenzie once lived.
I very much enjoyed Peter May’s Lewis trilogy so this book appealed to me but reading the novel, it was the nature of life in Canada and its history which caught my interest most. The story is fascinating on many levels, but it takes time to reach the satisfactory conclusion.
Entry Island on Amazon UK
My Review of The Black House by Peter May
