This is a chilling novel – both literally and metaphorically. Set in the year 2051, after decades of politicians ignoring and denying the effects of climate change, the equatorial regions are now far too hot for human habitation, whole swathes of low-lying areas are totally submerged in the sea and, because of the destruction of the Gulf Stream, Scotland now suffers winters of stormy Arctic severity. It’s exhausting, all my contemporaries were retiring so I thought, why can’t I retire? I wanted to read for pleasure and to get involved in music, which is the other big thing in my life.

Younger's body has been refrigerated at a creepy hotel where he and Sita are the only guests. Her findings suggest the cause of his death and other troubling evidence. What is discovered puts the lives of Sita and Brodie in extreme jeopardy and leads to several more deaths. His daughter is still rejecting Brodie, and his time to reconcile is running out. There are some intense, breathtaking actions, and a political coverup is revealed. And Brodie is determined to take what may be his last opportunity to tell his daughter what he has been silent about for the ten years since her mother’s death. Once again, Peter May has returned to Scotland with a complex novel that combines climate apocalyptic changes, murder mystery and a domestic situation that has left a policeman’s relationship with his daughter severed for the past 10 years. As the story begins, we are in the year 2051, in a very altered Scotland and a very altered world. While the equatorial world is now too hot to sustain life, Scotland has become a country divided between rain and blizzards. Coastal areas are gone. Travel is by new evolved methods that go limited distances. But crime still exists.

He chose to write about it in the context of a thriller and that’s the same approach he has taken with A Winter Grave.

Writing can be a lonely experience, but when you are researching you are out there in the world. If I think of all the research trips I made to China over about seven years, I met so many people, made so many friends and saw such extraordinary things.” Younger’s body has been kept refrigerated in a cabinet and what Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy uncover during the autopsy puts both their lives in danger. Brodie must fast his past as well as a killer who is desperate to keep secret what George Younger’s investigations had threatened to expose. Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow detective. He is enduring more problems than most troubled detectives in recent books. His wife committed suicide, and his daughter, Addie, hates him and has not spoken to him for ten years. She blames Brodie for her mother's death and has not allowed him to meet his grandson. If this was not enough to cause despair, he has learned that he has only six months, perhaps less, to live. Brodie has an ulterior motive for volunteering to take on this case. He has received a death sentence of his own, and has something personal he has to get out of the way before he departs this earth for good. So, in reality, he is a man with nothing to lose, and a will to live.It’s the year 2051, and the subject of climate change has been ignored for so long, and now it’s too late, with catastrophic changes taking place across the world. Huge areas of the world are under water, whilst others are too hot to be habitable. I mean, literacy is one of the pillars of civilisation and to damage the opportunity that young people have to read is seriously undermining our society.” No clear path to authorhood There are multiple twists and turns throughout the novel which kept me on the edge of my seat, and an ending I never saw coming. 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 was really in with the Chinese police,” says Peter. “It was like getting an introduction to the mafia from a made man! When I first went I was met at the airport by the police, which was a bit alarming. They just whisked me off to my hotel and then took me to the police university.” Climate change The first death is confirmed as suspicious. Another murder follows. Brodie is cut off from help in a village where an unidentified killer is hiding. He would be their obvious next victim… Questions and Answers

In A Winter Grave, the reader meets protagonist Cameron Brodie at two stages in his life: his early career, set in 2023, and a murder investigation in 2051, where he travels to a snow and ice-covered Kinlochleven to face the ghosts of his past.

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.I do a very detailed synopsis, I do the drafting side of it when I am working on the synopsis,” he says. “Then when I’m finished it, I’m finished it – I don’t want to see it again, it’s on the spike!” A Winter Grave takes place in the not-too-distant future, in 2051. It begins with the discovery of the body of an investigative reporter. Glasgow Police DI Cameron Brodie, fresh from failing to get murder conviction due to technical complications, rejects his DCI’s request to accompany the pathologist to perform a post mortem on Younger, and, noting his expertise in hill walking, examine the scene. But then he receives a diagnosis adverse enough to change his mind. When the body of investigative journalist George Younger is discovered entombed in an ice tunnel in the Mamore Forest, veteran Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate. However, the investigation is just an ostensible reason; primarily he wishes to reconcile with the woman who discovered the body, his estranged daughter, Addie. The two haven’t spoken for over ten years, since the death of Brodie’s wife, Mel. This could slow or stop the Gulf Stream, which is what brings temperate weather to Western Europe and the British Isles. With equatorial temperatures creating an unliveable wilderness, forcing hot air north to deform the Jet Stream, ice cold air is dragged down from the Polar Vortex. Thus creating a world of temperature extremes.