A Winter Grave

by Peter May

A Winter Grave is by Peter May, a writer of very thoughtful crime fiction. This is a work of cli-fi, really, set in the near future (2051), in a world where we didn’t stop global warming in time. The action takes place in May’s native Scotland, both in Glasgow and a remote Highland village during an ice storm. Occasionally it’s a little didactic, but it’s easy to forgive, given the subject matter. It’s very evocatively done, and the melancholy mood of the book stays with you.

The book, according to the author

“In the autumn of 2021, Peter watched and read about the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow with a growing sense of concern. Just three months earlier, the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had published their scariest prediction yet: that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster.

He looked into the fossil fuel industry and the big energy companies, those making staggering amounts of money extracting fossil fuels from our planet, refining and shipping them to every corner of the earth, whilst also being in danger of destroying the planet. He read further about climate change in general and how it would affect the oceans, the Gulf stream and ultimately our planet.

Keen to bring this to people’s attention, and wanting to put it in a readable format, Peter decided to use his skills as a journalist to embark on some in-depth research of his own and then use some of what he found within a crime thriller. He decided to set the story almost thirty years from now, in a world transformed by a changing climate.

Peter also looked into the possible transport of the future driven by electricity and green hydrogen produced by renewable energies, for example an eVTOL plane, plus icom mobiles. He used a specifically commissioned drone to explore the area high up above the loch he uses within A Winter Grave and used the footage from that within his story.

At the root of all this Peter’s master plan was to combine his research into climate change with crime fiction. A Winter Grave would be a crime thriller, but its background would be one of climate change and its potential effects in the future.”