Excerpt from Coffin Road by Peter May, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

How had I come to be washed up there? That I had been wearing a life jacket suggested I had been on a boat. Where had I been? What happened to the boat? Had I been alone? So many questions crowd my confusion that I turn away, pain filling my head.

Bran sits in the arch, watching me, and when I catch his eye he lifts a hopeful head. But I am distracted by the bottle of whisky that I see on the worktop, several inches of gold trapping light from the window to give it an inner glow. In the cabinet above, I find a glass and pour in three good fingers. Without thought or hesitation I splash in a little water from the tap. So this is how I like my uisge beatha. Quite unconsciously I am discovering little things about myself. Even that I know the Gaelic for whisky.

It tastes marvelous, warm and smoky with an underlying sweetness. I look at the label. Caol Ila. An island whisky. Pale and peaty. I carry my glass and the bottle through to the sitting room, set the bottle on the coffee table and cross to stand at the French window, staring out at the sands and the light that sweeps across them between the shadows of fast-moving clouds. A flash on the opposite shore catches my attention. A fleeting reflection of light on glass. I look around the room behind me. Somehow, earlier, I had registered the binoculars sitting on the mantel. I fetch them, set my glass beside the bottle, and raise the twin lenses to my eyes. It takes me a moment, but then there he is. The watcher on the far shore, whom I had seen from the beach. A man, my own binoculars reveal to me now. I can see him quite clearly. He has long hair blowing back in the wind, and a patchy, straggling beard on a thin, mean face. And he is watching me watching him.

I am still shaking a little, and so it is difficult to keep the glasses steady and the man in focus. But I see him lower his binoculars and turn to climb up into the caravan behind him. I can see a satellite dish fixed to the end of the vehicle and what looks like a small radio mast. And, panning left, I find a battered-looking Land Rover with a canvas roof. Both sit elevated and exposed on what I know is called the machair, that area of fertile grassland around the coastal fringes of the islands, where wild flowers bloom in spring abundance and the lambs feed to bring almost sweet, ready-salted meat to the plate.

I return my binoculars to their place above the stove, lift my glass and sink into the settee that faces the view to the beach. I wonder what time it is. Hard to tell whether it is morning or afternoon, and I realize for the first time that I am not wearing a watch. And yet from the band of pale skin around my left wrist, on an arm that has been tanned by sun or wind, it is clear that it is my habit to do so.

Sun streams now through the window and I feel the heat of it on my feet and my legs. I sip slowly on my glass as Bran clambers on to the settee beside me, settling himself to lay his head in my lap. I run absent fingers across his head, idly stroking his neck to bring comfort to us both, and I have no recollection of even finishing my whisky.

Excerpted from Coffin Road by Peter May. Copyright © 2016 by Peter May. Excerpted by permission of Quercus. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.