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The Lewis Man is the second book in the Lewis Trilogy by award-winning British journalist and author, Peter May. Ten months on from losing his young son to a hit-and-run, Fin Macleod has quit his police job, divorced his wife of fourteen years, and is back on the Isle of Lewis, renovating the derelict white house on his late parents’ croft. Will he stay? Uncertain.

He’s tentatively connecting with Fionnlagh, the teenaged son he didn’t know he had (although he feels the same is unlikely with his first love, Marsaili, the young man’s widowed mother), when DS George Gunn brings puzzling news. A young man’s body, the victim of a brutal attack, has been uncovered in the local peat bog.

This corpse, though, was not buried hundreds of years ago, but perhaps less than sixty, and DNA indicates a sibling relationship to Tormod Macdonald, father of Marsaili. The match makes the old man the prime and only suspect, but Tormod always claimed to be an only child, and now has rapidly deteriorating dementia, which will make identifying the body a challenge.

While Gunn and Marsaili feel that anything Tormod tells them can’t be relied upon, Fin believes that the old man’s scattered recollections and fragments of memory are probably accurate, and that he would have no reason to lie. He regards what seem to be irrational ravings as potential clues and, with a somewhat reluctant Gunn, follows up on them to make a startling discovery.

Before the truth is revealed, there are trips to Eriskay and Edinburgh, to a tiny seaside village with an unusual church, and chats with a genealogist, an archivist, a former orphanage inmate, and a well-known Edinburgh crime figure. The friction between Catholic and Protestant, the “homers” taken from orphanages and often forced into slave labour, the traditional knitting patterns of Eriskay, and a St Christopher medal, all play significant parts.

May employs twin narratives to tell the story: Fin’s details present day events while Tormod recalls incidents from his youth, six decades earlier. As always, May’s gorgeous descriptive prose evokes the rugged beauty of his setting: “All along the ragged coastline, the sea sucked and frothed and growled, tireless legions of riderless white horses crashing up against the stubborn stone of unyielding black cliffs.” is one example.

Another: “The sky was black and blue, brooding, contused, rolling in off the ocean low and unbroken. The first spits of rain were smeared across his windscreen by the intermittent passage of its wipers. The pewter of the ocean itself was punctuated by the whites of breaking waves ten or fifteen feet high, and the solitary blue flashing light of the police car next to the ambulance was swallowed into insignificance by the vastness of the landscape.” The third instalment of this excellent Scottish crime trilogy, The Chessmen, is eagerly anticipated.