Coffin Road

A mystery set within a bubble very much heightens the senses when reading COFFIN ROAD.  The action is placed within an isolated small seaside town and there are very few characters for the reader to learn about and glean clues from.  The lead, who has lost his memory, retraces his steps in an effort to find out who he is, what kind of man he is, and what it is that he has done that has left him with such a leaden feeling of dread. 

May reaches deep into the psyche of his lead character and we are immersed very quickly in his nightmare.  Having washed up on a beach with injuries, Neal Maclean seems to have no family, no close friends, and lives in a cottage bereft of meaning personal effects with only his dog for company. He is compelled however to traverse what is locally known as Coffin Road, a walkers trail along the coastline.  As fleeting memories return to Neal, it becomes even more puzzling to him as to why he has chosen to remove himself from all he has known to live in this beautiful but remote part of Scotland. When he discovers a man’s body on a nearby island, Neal becomes more convinced that the reason why he came to be alone in this remote part of the world was because he had felt a need to hide.

Peter May never loses his way in COFFIN ROAD, coaxing his reader forward as Neal Maclean becomes more desperate to solve the mystery that his own life.  COFFIN ROAD is a beautifully descriptive novel as well as being a very personal one; the roar of the wind and the crashing of the ocean are ever present as the melancholic backdrop to one mans’ desperation.  The amnesia is thankfully only a minor plot device (that old chestnut) and it is not a novel about one man rediscovering himself – there are other forces at play that are very left field to the moody first half of this book.

Fans of Peter May will gleefully add COFFIN ROAD to their collection and new readers would be pleased with this almost closed room mystery that needs very few literary props to satisfy.

Amnesia is a bit of a cliché of the crime and thriller genres. It is a fairly easy way to set up a mystery by having the injured protagonist lose their memory and have to investigate themselves. And so it is with Peter May’s latest thriller Coffin Road. While it works, the idea is old fashioned, and May follows the usual plot beats of an amnesia tale, doing nothing to twist this idea into something new.

The main character wakes up on a beach, soaked through and in danger of hypothermia. A helpful neighbour directs him to a nearby cottage which turns out to be his cottage. It is familiar but does not provide him with any clues as to who he might be. As he starts to uncover something about his life, including an affair with his neighbour’s wife and some hidden beehives in the hills, a body is found on one of the nearby islands and he feels that he might have been responsible.

At the same time, Karen, a rebellious teenager finds out that her dead father might not have committed suicide after all. She sets out to learn the truth about his disappearance. As with the amnesia of the main character, this is a common thriller plot device. And again, the plot beats are fairly easy to predict.

There are a number of aspects of Coffin Road that make it worth the effort. The first is the setting in the Outer Hebrides. The ruggedly beautiful Island of Harris and the nearby Seven Hunters Islands make a spectacular backdrop. Fans of Peter May will be familiar with this area from his Lewis trilogy and it is a welcome return.

The other is the underlying plot. Skullduggery in big agribusiness and big pharma is a fertile area for thriller writers - Coffin Road brings Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener to mind. While delivering a powerful message, May manages to keep the plot central as opposed to polemic, trusting that the premise is scarily plausible and is enough to drive this thriller forward.

While there are plenty of twists and a little bait and switch, the plot strands come together in much the way thriller readers would expect. It is down to May’s skill as a writer that Coffin Road is an engaging, if not particularly original thriller.