Cockle Strand

On a grey morning on the Isle of Barra, a cockle-picker finds a body on the great tidal strand at Tràigh Mhòr - a rake laid neat beside him, as though the sea had simply come and taken him. The island is content to call it a drowning. Detective Inspector Cat MacNeil is not.

Cat left Barra at eighteen and swore she would never come back. Now she is home, and the dead man is Niall Ferguson, a local son returned from the sea - killed on ground the tide never reached, his boots clean of the very sand he was meant to have drowned wading through. Someone staged this. Someone the whole island trusts.

As Cat and her sergeant Sonny follow a thread of stolen money, a forged signature, and a child's string of beads found where no drowned man could have dropped them, the case narrows to a name nobody will say aloud - because on an island this small, the guilty are never strangers. They carried your coffin. They shook your hand at the door. They were let belong.

But the closer Cat comes to the truth, the closer she comes to a flat-calm night twenty-two years ago, and a drowning of her own she has never let herself name.

Atmospheric, slow-burning and steeped in the wild beauty of the Outer Hebrides, Cockle Strand is the first in the DI Cat MacNeil series - a haunting Scottish crime novel for readers of Ann Cleeves and Peter May.