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Peter May’s The Black House (Silver Oak)  is the first of a mystery trilogy set in Scotland and featuring the broody Sergeant Fin Macleod. I loved the beginning book in this series and ordered the second (already published in Europe.) It is an evocative, dark and almost mystical series which uses the haunted and beautiful towns of Scotland as a featured character and an integral part of the narrative. I could almost feel the stormy coastlines and damp fundamentalist Protestant church communities and the great irony – familiar to those of us who live in the country, of staggering beauty set against a backdrop of tradition,  small-mindedness and grinding poverty. There are those who escape towns like this, and those who never manage to get out. Our hero is trapped in the middle.

I have to be clear that this is a  dark book, but not a gruesome or horror-driven tale. (I am uncomfortable with the popular Scandanavian books that feature serial killers who torture and mutilate women and am bewildered by their popularity.) This book has a serial killer but there are only two murders and the book quickly leaves the killing behind as we drop into a rich, beautifully written character study of Fin Macleod, who has a lot to be broody about, and the remote towns of Scotland. Fin’s only child, a son, has just been killed in an accident and his largely loveless marriage is falling apart. He tells his commander quite frankly that he wished he finished college and had become something other than a detective.

His commander has different ideas. Get back to work, he says, or quit. As the story opens up, Macleod is called back from his time off mourning  in Glasgow and ordered to a fishing community in the Outer Hebrides, off of the Isle of Lewis. His wife assures him that if leaves her,  she will not be there when he returns. Macleod goes anyway. A body has been found murdered in his own birthplace, the seacoast town of Crobost, a community he left many years ago and has no desire to ever see again.  This book is different from most procedurals. From the minute Fin returns to Crobost he begins to confront the many ghosts from his own past. His parents were killed in an automobile accident when he was a child, and he was sent to live with his eccentric aunt. His best friend from childhood is not who he remembers him to be, and he finds the beautiful young woman he loved for most of his life but left behind. She is trapped in an awful marriage and an empty life.

Fin finds brutal bullies who tormented him, an angry minister’s son and he is tormented by memories of his forced trip to the island of An Sgier where islanders trek once a year in brutal and dangerous circumstances to kill thousands of guga birds and bring them back to eat. This is an ancient tradition and has awful and suppressed  memories for Fin of his own trip and his own experience on An Sgier, something he has never quite been able to recall or deal with. His memories of the trip to the island – animal rights activists gather every year to try and stop the slaughter –  are riveting. His characters are rich, diverse and perfectly rendered.

After awhile, it becomes clear that the mystery revolves not around the murders, but around Fin himself. He is the story, his life, his friends, his memories.  He abandons the role of the detective and plunges into the mystery of own life and lost love and the trauma of An Sgier.  He confronts fatherhood in a surprising but powerful way. Jay does a wonderful job of capturing this rough life, of communities bound by secrecy and tradition and very much under the unyielding thumb of the joyless Protestant Church. He is an insider turned outsider turned insider again, and his own history in this place sucks him in like a sinkhole. The question here is not whether you can go home again, but whether you can ever really leave.  Macleod is an honest man, but a lost soul seeking redemption and deliverance.

This series is already a huge bestseller in Europe, and I would imagine it will be here as well, and deservedly so. It is a novel that transcends the constricts of the mystery and tells a larger, often disturbing but very powerful story of love and family, memory and loss. You will feel as if you are walking through those Scottish towns, looking at those lush green hills and riding the stormy waters of the Hebrides, graveyard to countless ships for centuries. I highly recommend this book for mystery lovers looking for a new series to embrace. I will be reading all of them.