Going Home Again 
 Peter May's novel is set at the northernmost tip of the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly of Scotland offshore islands, the Hebrides. It is a beautiful, desolate country whose inhabitants jealously guard their own traditions. One of these, although mentioned only a few times in the text, is that of Gaelic psalm singing, the semi-improvised congregational worship which attests to the importance of the Church in island life, even today. I recommend watching the six-minute You Tube video, not only for the singing itself, but also the liquid accent of its presenter and the striking views of Lewis that intercut the singing. It is the best introduction to the world of Lewis that I know, especially in that complements but does not challenge Peter May's own powers of description. 
 Those powers are at their best when May describes another Lewis custom that does play a major part in May's novel: the annual guga harvest. There are videos of this too, but they seem frivolous in comparison. Each year, from time immemorial, a dozen men from Lewis have gone out to the island of Sula Sgeir, some forty miles to the north, to collect the chicks of the millions of gannets that nest there. Now under strict government control, it is a sustainable harvest that yields a highly-prized delicacy, apparently tasting somewhere between kipper and duck. But no amount of control lessens the danger to the men engaged in it, living together in an abandoned stone building (the Blackhouse of the title) and roping down the sheer cliffs. For the selected few, going out for the first time is the experience that turns boys into men, and binds an already close community even tighter. Peter May renames the island, moves it further out, and makes its cliffs even more forbidding, but what really matters is what happens between the people huddled together on that barren rock. 
 The novel is sold, I suppose, as a mystery, but that is merely framework; so far from police procedural, I would call it police personal, very personal indeed. Edinburgh detective DI Fin Macleod, shaken by a tragedy that has shattered his marriage, is sent back to his birthplace to help investigate a gruesome murder that looks similar to an unsolved case in the capital. Not only does he know the place and speak the language, but the victim, Angus Macritchie, was one of the most feared bullies at his primary school. Indeed Fin knows just about everyone connected with the case, who include his former best friend, his ex-girlfriend, the son of the old Minister now Minister himself, and many of the older men who had shaped his own childhood. He understands why "Angel" Macritchie continued to be feared and hated, so that nobody mourns his passing. Although much has changed on the island (the children's swings, for example, are no longer chained on the Sabbath), all the old passions and resentments still remain. 
 The murder is solved, and May pulls out a magnificently tense climax, but most of the drama takes place thirty years in the past, in Fin's childhood and adolescence, culminating in the fateful trip to the rock of An Sgeir just before he left the island for good. For a while, May alternates third-person chapters set in the present with first-person memories, but soon the past invades even the present sections. Readers of traditional mysteries may grow impatient with the proportion of back-story to action, as for a while I did myself. But when I came to the dramatic revelations of the final pages, and saw that this really was a murder rooted deep in the past, my tentative four stars rose again to five.