The Black Loch

Fin Macleod is back in the Hebrides bringing a bunch of memories and digging up yet more long buried island secrets in a quest to rescue his son from a murder charge. Does every one on the island have a dark and terrible secret? There are certainly a lot of them to go around.

I did enjoy the Louis trilogy, so this is a welcome return and I finished the whole thing within a couple of days of purchase. It’s really interesting to see the characters from that original trilogy now middle-aged with grown-up children. As always with Peter, this is a complex and compelling tale and we really get inside the characters heads, particularly that of Finn McLeod himself the story is actually quite bleak in some ways, where Fin and Marsaila as their son has been accused of murder, but even though this is resolved there still a lot of pain to go around. Oh, and industrial salmon farming comes in for quite a beating too…

There are some great callbacks to the original books and the characters from those, but I just can’t help feeling that there is nobody on the islands that doesn’t have some buried secret and there has been an awful lot of death, tragedy, partner swapping and parental confusion. Nevertheless, this is a great story, kept me really involved and although I figured out some parts of it the overall arc fits together really well and there is a satisfying ending.