Add to this a central character prepared to give his all in one last fight and you have a totally gripping crime thriller that is chilling in more ways than one. Ferocious storms have become a frequent occurrence for the residents of Kinlochleven, resulting in power cuts and the loss of communications with the outside world for days at a time.

Alongside an absorbing and action-packed crime story, and the depiction of the potential impacts of climate change on the world, is Inspector Cameron Brodie’s deeply personal story, told through flashbacks to 2023. Ultimately the book which was supposed to be a page turner, ended up being heavy and failed to leave a real impact. He is the creator of three major television drama series and presided over two of the highest-rated serials in his homeland before quitting television to concentrate on his first love, writing novels. I was confused and found that I wasn’t enjoying this tale much at all - I was already considering giving up on it.

A Winter Grave is not an easy read; the near future is quite bleak so to say, in more than one meaning. While he digests this he is dispatched off to Kinlochleven in the Scottish Highlands, in an e-chopper and freshly kitted out with all singing and dancing James Bond style glasses.

I would like to thank both Netgalley and Quercus books for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.Thanks to the ruined landscape and extreme weather, the atmosphere is oppressive, as Brodie considers the handful of likely suspects and their potential motivations. My thanks to Quercus Books for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. He is identified as George Younger, an investigative reporter who went missing three months earlier. Just as mobile phones present a problem for thriller writing in the present day, the imagined leaps in communication technology in 2050s Scotland could have made a nonsense of some of the most gripping passages here.

May paints a clear, poetic, and tragic picture of the wreck of a man he has become, but several things in his life are also about to change. Hailstorms flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the windscreen… He could barely see the road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow on the recently cleared tarmac. The year is 2051, and while the landscape at high altitudes may not have changed much, it is a different story when the action switches back to Glasgow. There are advances in technology, developments in transportation, and changes in the environment; there are also expected and unexpected complications in all areas.When the body of investigative journalist George Younger is discovered entombed in an ice tunnel in the Mamore Forest, veteran Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate. We now get to meet police detective Cameron Brodie who has been sent to investigate the body on the mountain. I just found it really hard overall to get into the story and feel any certain way towards any of the characters. The body has been identified as missing journalist Charles Younger but now the question is what happened to Mr Younger was it an accident or was it fowl play.

May sets his story in a near future where an independent Scotland has rejoined the EU, and climate change has significantly raised sea levels, causing widespread flooding and a huge increase in climate refugees, which exacerbates racism, and a plague of resistant German cockroaches: he paints a realistic if rather frightening picture of how the world could look if climate change is allowed to progress at the current rate. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to attend a crime scene in the mountains where a body has been discovered frozen in the ice. Interspersed throughout Brodie’s narrative are flashbacks to 2023, when he first met Addie’s mother, gradually revealing what has weighed so heavily on Brodie’s conscience for a decade. A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station in Kinlochleven discovers the body of a missing man entombed in ice.It’s good that I make a habit of trying nót to read too much information and/or reviews before I read a book myself. While the equatorial world is now too hot to sustain life, Scotland has become a country divided between rain and blizzards. When his first book was adapted as a major drama series for the BBC, he quit journalism and during the high-octane fifteen years that followed, became one of Scotland's most successful television dramatists. Three months earlier, award-winning Scottish Herald investigative journalist, Charles Younger, the bane of corrupt politicians, went missing near Loch Leven. Brodie has much on his mind as the story progresses and his personal situation is appalling to imagine, but he never gives up.