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On a weather‑beaten rock forty miles west of the Hebrides, they still call Skarav 'Island of
the Dead' - a place of sheer cliffs, vanished communities and secrets buried as deep as
the graves in its thin soil. When burned‑out Glasgow journalist Ethan MacGregor returns
there for the first time in fourteen years, it is not for the scenery but an ultimatum: face
what happened the night his first love fell from the island's highest cliff, or lose his wife
and baby daughter.
At seventeen, Donna Gillies was fearless, barefoot and the only girl Ethan ever truly loved
- until she died on a moonlit August night, pregnant and broken on the rocks below a
headland called The Saddle. The island has never doubted who killed her: Christopher
MacGregor, Ethan's devout father.
On the mainland, Detective George Gunn is also haunted by that night: by the body he
helped gather in pieces from the rocks, and the post‑mortem that proved Donna was
struck with a tubular weapon before she went over the edge. A recent cliff‑top suicide has
shattered the fragile lid he kept on those memories, and when word reaches him that
Ethan is back on St. Columba, Gunn seizes on the case review as his last chance at
redemption.
As a storm season closes in, Ethan and Gunn follow different paths back to The Saddle,
through traumatised families, the politics of a shrinking island, and the dangerous loyalties
of a group of friends who once believed they would all escape. On an island where the
dead are never far from the living, Island of the Dead is a tense, atmospheric thriller
about faith and obsession, first love and generational guilt - and about whether the truth,
once unearthed, can ever set anyone free.
On a weather‑beaten rock forty miles west of the Hebrides, they still call Skarav 'Island of
the Dead' - a place of sheer cliffs, vanished communities and secrets buried as deep as
the graves in its thin soil. When burned‑out Glasgow journalist Ethan MacGregor returns
there for the first time in fourteen years, it is not for the scenery but an ultimatum: face
what happened the night his first love fell from the island's highest cliff, or lose his wife
and baby daughter.
At seventeen, Donna Gillies was fearless, barefoot and the only girl Ethan ever truly loved
- until she died on a moonlit August night, pregnant and broken on the rocks below a
headland called The Saddle. The island has never doubted who killed her: Christopher
MacGregor, Ethan's devout father.
On the mainland, Detective George Gunn is also haunted by that night: by the body he
helped gather in pieces from the rocks, and the post‑mortem that proved Donna was
struck with a tubular weapon before she went over the edge. A recent cliff‑top suicide has
shattered the fragile lid he kept on those memories, and when word reaches him that
Ethan is back on St. Columba, Gunn seizes on the case review as his last chance at
redemption.
As a storm season closes in, Ethan and Gunn follow different paths back to The Saddle,
through traumatised families, the politics of a shrinking island, and the dangerous loyalties
of a group of friends who once believed they would all escape. On an island where the
dead are never far from the living, Island of the Dead is a tense, atmospheric thriller
about faith and obsession, first love and generational guilt - and about whether the truth,
once unearthed, can ever set anyone free.