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.
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