I have spent a lot of summer weekends on an island in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a beautiful, wild, windswept place that can, as Gull Island does in my book, feel utterly remote. When Jude makes her way there, it’s early April, cold, and lonely. Her mother, now suffering from dementia, has asked her to find her father’s will, but she has other reasons to search the cottage. Although finding the will may be urgent, since her father has disappeared, she realises that she is here to sift through old photographs and letters, evidence that she had once been loved by her family. She had grown up here, in the questionable care of her perfectionist, destructive father, her distant mother and a sister who had always been jealous of her. The lightless nights, her terrifying dreams, and the old photographs bring back dark, long buried memories as Jude struggles to remember the horror of past events she had successfully blocked with too much booze. A massive storm cuts loose her boat and her only escape from the island. She must face her demons—both imagined and real. Below are some more thrillers that take advantage of remote island settings to build suspense.
Linwood Barclay, Look Both Ways
A fast-moving tale with enough twists and turns to challenge even the best drivers. And there are only driverless cars on this island, polite and efficient cars that, with some canny reprogramming, can become killers. I grew rather fond of some people on Garrett Island, especially Sandra Montrose, the singer mom who is hired to handle PR for Arrival Inc, the company launching all those cars, and her two children, both of whom turn out to be much more resourceful than in my initial impressions. I don’t want to reveal the plot but do want to mention that some people here harbour nasty secrets. Perhaps Barclay’s own hidden agenda is that there are a few questions to ask as we enter the era of driverless cars. I saw this recent report in the Wall Street Journal: “San Francisco residents have complained about disruptions related to driverless cars”. And it’s only the beginning.
J. T. Ellison, Her Dark Lies
A beautiful island in the Mediterranean, warm summer breezes, an elegant villa built high on the rocks overlooking the azure ocean, must be the perfect setting for a dream wedding. Or for a murder. The groom’s wealthy family and the wedding guests are not alone. Some ghastly menace inhabits island. Clare and Jack are in love. She is ready to ignore the mysterious death of his first wife and he is ready to accept a rebel-artist into his more traditional life. They have everything to look forward to. Or do they? As a storm moves in and the tension mounts, readers will be propelled to the shocking end.
Adrian McKinty, The Island
I have been a Sean Duffy fan since Duffy’s early days, so I bought The Island as soon as I could. But there is no Sean in this novel. Instead, there is a cast of characters you would want to avoid if you encountered them on an island. In fact, you would not want to be on this particular island, no matter how attractive it looks from the mainland. A twisty, violent, claustrophobic thriller that kept me reading until the early morning, as the characters grew on me and knowing their fate had become vitally important. And now I am ready for the next wise-cracking Sean Duffy mystery, The Detective Up Late.
Ruth Ware, The Lying Game
The Reach is not exactly on an island, but it is surrounded by treacherous marshland on one side and the sea on the other and Ruth Ware is such a good writer, she can make your skin crawl in anticipation as you turn the pages. The three women are summoned here by their childhood friend. It’s just a few words, but they know instantly that they must come. They had been a close-knit group at the nearby boarding school, always separate from the others, not only because of their silly lying games but also because they often escaped at night from their and made their way here to swim, to experiment with alcohol, to smoke and laugh at other girls not as smart as they were. Now, all grown up, they have come back for a reckoning with the terrifying past.
P.D. James, The Lighthouse
At 85, P.D. James displays her much admired talents as one of the great crime writers of all time. The setting is Combe Island, with its terrible history of piracy and slavery, now the privately owned playground of the rich and famous. I enjoyed James’s deftly drawn cast of characters, each one unique and memorable, though none quite as memorable as the first murder victim, the nasty, egotistical writer, Nathan Oliver and the chief investigator of the crime: Commander Adam Dalgliesh. A poet as well as a policeman, Dalgliesh is aging, emotionally complicated, yet thoroughly methodical approach to the case will keep you guessing till almost the end. This is Dalgliesh’s 13th opportunity to shine in a P.D. James novel.
Rachel Howzell Hall, They All Fall Down
I loved this book from the first page. Miriam Macy’s unguarded observations, her self-serving reminiscences, her hilarious comments invited me to share her adventure. And it was some adventure! “The trip of a lifetime”, as it was first presented to Miriam and six other people she had just met, had it all: a private island off the coast of Mexico, a luxury villa, superb food and maybe a fortune in winnings. But that is not how this story unfolds. The invitation was a ruse. The host may be bent on retribution for past sins. In an homage to the still undisputed queen of crime, Agatha Christie, Howzell Hall has landed seven strangers in an isolated paradise where each one is tested and one by one “they all fall down”. Or, perhaps, not all.
Peter May, The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, The Chessmen
The Lewis Trilogy is a brilliant, riveting, series of three interconnected books, all set, or mostly set on the Isle of Lewis, at the northern end of the Outer Hebrides. Lewis is the perfect desolate setting for May’s deeply disturbing tales. The Blackhouse is the first in the series. Fin Macleod is the most engaging, savvy, yet troubled detective to solve the grisly murders that start the investigation. He is one of the most sympathetic action heroes in modern thrillers, convincing both in his efforts to deal with his own feelings—yes, there is a love story running through the book—and the generosity he shows to Lewis and its denizens. May’s descriptions of the islands are beautifully written and wholly realized. And just one more comment: you can read each book independently, I just read them back to back because when I finished the first, I was already waiting for the next one.
Rebecca Netley, The Whistling
A mystery wrapped in a ghost story, The Whistling is a throwback to those eery, mysterious books written in the last century or earlier, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic Rebecca, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Even Netley’s writing style reminded me of those classics of the genre and many latecomers with an old house welcoming a new governess. For a while, as I was reading The Whistling, I waited for the child in the young governess’s care to turn into one of Henry James’s terrifying children in The Turn of the Screw, but she doesn’t. Nor is the governess captured by the evil on Skelthsea island. She finds a way through the fog and hauntings to save her charge and, in the end, herself. This unusual book was recommended to me by a local bookseller and I think I should forgive her for my sleepless night.
Thomas King, Obsidian
The setting is not exactly an island, but Chinook is isolated enough to feel like an island, and I simply could not resist including it here because I love Thomas King’s Dreadfulwater Mysteries. Obsidian is the 5th novel in the series and I have read them all. There is a killer on the loose and Thumps, now retired, is drawn into finding him because the murders bear the hallmarks of his girlfriend’s and her daughter’s deaths. While the story was enough to draw me in, I loved revisiting Thumps’s friends, and long-time associates in the doughnut shop, Al’s diner, the bookshop and, as in all small, isolated towns sharing their banter and their stories. The first Thomas King book I read is Green Grass, Running Water and have been a fan of his writing ever since.
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