Bitter Tea and Mystery: Six Degrees of Separation: From The Safekeep to Tales of the South Pacific

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Six Degrees of Separation: From The Safekeep to Ta...: The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest . The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and us...

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Six Degrees of Separation: From Wifedom to Hebrides

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Six Degrees of Separation: From Wifedom to Hebrides: The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest . The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and u...

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Lockdown: Peter May

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Lockdown: Peter May:  From the cover of my edition of Lockdown : London, the epicenter of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder s...

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Entry Island: Peter May

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Entry Island: Peter May: Entry Island blends historical fiction with a present-day police procedural. Both stories come together in the end, as we expect. The histor...

Bitter Tea and Mystery Review: The Blackhouse: Peter May

Bitter Tea and Mystery: The Blackhouse: Peter May: Description from the dust jacket of my edition: When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides that bea...

Monday With Kaye: "Entry Island" by Peter May

Entry Island by Peter May won the Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the year back in 2014. Today,  Kaye George brings us a review of the book ….

Entry Island by Peter May

Canada seems much more like a foreign country than usual in this polyglot setting. Amid the French-speaking Magdalen Islands (Madeleine in French), lies English-speaking Entry Island, settled in part by Scots who came during the potato famine years in the 1800s.

The story starts slowly, but builds gradually—two stories actually. The modern day narrative sends English speaker, Sime Mackenzie, whose Scottish/Gaelic family refused to leave Quebec when it went all French, to investigate a murder on Entry Island. The rest of the team are French speakers. He is ill at ease with them, but Thomas Blanc, with whom he works most closely, is friendly. One member of the team is his ex, Marie-Ange, a vitriolic, bitter woman who makes everything harder.

As soon as Sime sees the woman who is accused of murdering her husband, he feels he knows her. In spite of overwhelming opinion against her, he fights to find a shred of evidence that she didn’t kill her husband. Sime is suffering from chronic insomnia, but has waking dreams that put him into the tales from his ancestor’s diaries that were read to him by his grandmother when he was a child. The insomnia gets so bad that it threatens to impair his judgement and to get him ousted from his job as he retreats deeper and deeper into the past, imagining that he actually is his ancestor, and that the accused woman is his ancestor’s long-lost love as this story runs alternating with the other one.

This is a tale of two islands, two mysteries, and two places and times. A tale of misfits isolated within their own cultures, and a tale of cultures battling each other, both in the 1800s and today.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Death in the Time of Ice, for Suspense Magazine
 

Via Mystery Fanfare: Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the Year

Mystery Fanfare: Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the Year: Hats Off to Peter May, winner of the Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the Year for Entry Island was announced tonight at Bloody Scotland ...