The best Scottish crime fiction novels seem to be polarised between noirish grit and grunge on the mean streets of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and more windswept tales set on rocky coasts and misty moors. The Winter Dead belongs in the latter category. DI Shona Oliver is in charge of a large rural beat which includes the wild shores of Dumfries and Galloway. Her husband, Robert, is doing time for financial fraud, leaving her to do her day job while trying to keep their guesthouse business solvent. 

A chance discovery (a bloodstained hammer discarded within a lorry load of firewood) presents a massive challenge which forces her to examine the integrity of people she has regarded as being valued friends. Shona also a seasoned member of the local lifeboat crew, and the over-arching sense of a community surviving in spite of the awful weather is reinforced in the early pages when Shona and her colleagues rescue a windsurfer battered against an unforgiving granite cliff by a force ten gale. The elemental theme continues as, following up the bloodstained hammer, Shona and a mountain rescue team are forced to rough it in an isolated visitor centre while searching for a missing forest Ranger.

The snow storm does its worst, and destroys any forensic traces, but when the missing man – John MacFarlane –  is found miles away, not only is the jigsaw jumbled up, but several of its pieces go missing.it is a well established trope of police novels that the central DI, already knee-deep and floundering in the riptide of a perplexing investigation, must also be plagued by family problems. Here, not only does Shona Oliver have her husband glumly sitting in jail, but she hears disturbing news of daughter Becca, away at university in Glasgow. Becca’s flatmate, Jack Rutherford, has been stabbed during an attempted phone snatch, and his injuries are life threatening.

To add to the rich tapestry of misdeeds Shona is tasked with investigating, a local petty crook has handed in something he has ‘found’. It is a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child, no bigger than a A4 sheet, but exquisite. She traces its recent provenance, but is it the original, or a saleroom copy?

A mixture of persistence and a touch of good luck results in something of a revelation about the murder of John MacFarlane, and it links the crime to an event decades earlier, in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Shona once again finds herself leading a manhunt, this time in the wintry malevolence of Dalgeddie Forest.

“As they went further from the track, the snow lay not like a decorative Christmas dusting, but like deep ash from some catastrophic fire. The branches of the fir swept down to the ground. The dark spaces enclosed by their grasp brought simultaneously a craving for sanctuary and a sense of her own vulnerability where every shadow seemed to hide a human shape. Her footsteps were impossibly loud. The deep powder squeaked and groaned, compacting under each step.”

The author who, like her heroine, is also part of a volunteer lifeboat crew, seamlessly weaves the different strands of the plot together, and Shona’s professional reputation is enhanced. She cannot rest easy, however, as fate has one dramatic personal surprise for her. This vivid and intriguing thriller will be published by Canelo Crime on 6th November.