Emigrant Sands

A Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery

By: Phillip Strang

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A storm tears open the machair at Bornish, and the sand gives up a woman who was never meant to be found.

Detective Inspector Cat MacNeil came home to the Outer Hebrides to get clear of a mainland career that went wrong — not to dig a murder out of the ground she was raised on. The bones are decades old. The grave was deliberate. And the only people who can name the dead woman are the neighbours, cousins and elders who watched Cat grow up, and who have kept their silence for a lifetime.

Following a trail of letters posted home from Canada — letters written in a hand that never aged — Cat uncovers a family that buried far more than a body, and a lie kept so patiently that the truth, when it comes, will cost the living everything.

To solve it she needs the one thing no mainland detective could bring: the blood-knowledge of the island, the reckoning of who belongs to whom.

Grave, elegiac and steeped in a Gaelic world going out like a tide, Emigrant Sands is the second DI Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery — for readers of Ann Cleeves and Peter May.