The Wolf Tree

A number of tropes exist in the crime fiction world, such as cosy crime, the police procedural and the locked room mystery, the latter being a great legacy of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and other ‘golden age’ writers. An established variation on this is the remote location: think Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, or Christie’s And Then There Were None, where the remote setting – be it the environmental conditions or the inhabitants – can obfuscate the solution. Laura McCluskey’s terrific debut is a novel that exploits this to great effect and combines additional elements: folkloric tradition and two (famously named) detectives with a dash of interpersonal conflict.

The setting for The Wolf Tree is Eilean Eadarm, an isolated Scottish island which is little more than a rock. Broody, windswept, and thoroughly uninviting to the two detectives – George Lennox and Richie Stewart – tasked with investigating a mysterious death. The inhabitants are insular, unfriendly, and wary of the outside interference in their day-to-day lives while they grapple with the death of one of their own. Eighteen-year-old Alan Ferguson was found dead at the base of the lighthouse, over a century after three lighthouse keepers disappeared without a trace. The two detectives find that nothing is as it seems, and with the weather preventing them from leaving the island until the case is resolved, neither the weather nor their slow progress is helping their relationship.

I loved the slow burn of this book, its gothic undertones, and characters I’d expect to find in Lanny. It’s one for lovers of Scottish folklore, viewers of the recent series The Red King, and more generally anyone who loves an atmospheric and suspenseful thriller!