The Blackhouse is the 17th novel from Scottish ex-pat Peter May.   May, a screenwriter and prolific author of crime fiction, is embarking on a trilogy with this offering, introducing us to complex and traumatised Detective Fin Macleod.

The tale opens with Macleod being dispatched back to Lewis after two decades of absence, sent to investigate a particularly gruesome murder.  A man has been hanged and eviscerated, his corpse found by a pair of canoodling teenagers on a Saturday night.  The case, as such cases are wont to do, takes Macleod on a journey through his own past, causing him to examine both his own life and the lives of those he left behind him when he departed the isle as a youth.

While the context of Macleod’s visit places The Blackhouse within the crime genre, the bulk of the story centres on Fin’s relationships with both the island and its residents, in both the present and the past.  As such, it functions as something of a coming of age tale, charting the events of Macleod’s troubled childhood, and the ongoing repercussions of those events in the present day.   Far from being crime driven, the crime which initiates proceedings can often feel incidental.  In terms of the story itself, this is by no means a negative;  May has a story to tell, and refuses to be sidetracked by the conventions of the genre.

That story is a fine fusion of place and character.  Macleod is complex, with a wider ethical range than many of his counterparts in crime fiction.  While he is sensitive and troubled, he is also capable of betraying those closest to him in the cruellest ways.  This is brave stuff from May, creating a challenging protagonist, demanding greater consideration from readers than a more simplistic everyman.

While the rest of the cast are credible and engaging, the real strength is in the stories May involves them in.  From youthful misdeeds to the raw emotion of adolescent infatuation, May captures the mood of childhood well.  The bullies harass the bullied with unfettered malignance.  Macleod’s tormentors think nothing of referring to him accurately but cruelly as “Orphan Boy,” and have no fear of retribution from their peers or their parents.  Macleod’s inconstant relationship with Marsaili oscillates between obsession, frustration and adoration, characterised at all times, on her side at least, by powerful force of feeling.  Aside from the events which will be universal to readers above a certain age, Macleod finds himself in scrapes which are uncommon and tragic.  Here May is able to maintain that atmosphere of childhood, reliving memories which should be halcyon but are instead stained with sadness.

Such is the strength of The Blackhouse.  In telling the tale of Fin Macleod’s younger days, it inverts everything which is sweet and beautiful about childhood and homecoming.  Fin’s friends are less pleased by his return than they are embittered by his departure.  There is a love at the heart of the book which has endured longer than many marriages, but brought almost nothing but regret.

If I have any reservations, the centre on the finale.  Many readers are dismayed by their own ingenuity, disappointed when a book allows them to see the end coming.  These readers will suffer no such problems with The Blackhouse, as it nears the opposite extreme, underpinning what is a highly charged and deeply evocative denouement with a plot twist which was not so much foreshadowed as it was intentionally hidden from view.

Such concerns aside, however, May has laid a fine foundation stone for the trilogy.  By no means a typical police procedural, The Blackhouse is instead a moody and emotive story of love, dark secrets, loss, homecoming and alienation.  It has a sense of place as strong as the very best of tartan noir, and will surely garner new fans for its already well decorated author.  Roll on number two.

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