What, for instance, really happened 17 years earlier, during the summer of Fin's departure, at the An Sgeir, the ancient and extremely perilous gannet-culling ritual re-enacted every year (this is fact) by 12 Lewis men on a barren 400ft basalt stack in the Atlantic? Denouements as devastating as this one are rare, as are cops who intrigue you as deeply as Fin. He was the only boy in his class to leave the island to go to university, but as the story unfolds, told partly by Fin as a boy, so do intimations of dark family secrets, brutality and betrayal. Fin Macleod, a Glasgow cop, returns to his birthplace in Lewis after 17 years to investigate a gruesome murder. If I didn't, May's descriptions of stormy skies, towering seas and tiny butt-and-bens clinging to cliffs would have made me long to go. I was briefly in Lewis in April, escaping the royal wedding en route to St Kilda, so I know the breathtakingly wild, windswept terrain. It's the first of a trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and it's brilliant – definitely the best crime novel I've heard this year.

And just as well he does, it turns out, because having failed to find an English publisher for The Blackhouse, he got it published in France instead, where it won an award.

The Blackhouse, by Peter May, read by Steve Worsley (12¾hrs unabridged, Isis, £31.49)Īs a lifelong addict of Scottish thrillers, it seems extraordinary that until now I'd never heard of Glasgow-born Peter May, author of a score of books, screenplays and TV series, who now lives in France.

The black house peter may