The Last Refuge by Craig Robertson
Apr. 30th, 2014 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
You wake up wet and cold. You must have passed out drunk.
Your head is full of muddle, empty of memories.
In your pocket is a grindaknivur, a knife for cutting whale meat.
The blade is coated in someone else’s blood.
You can run from your past but you can never hide from yourself …
When John Callum arrives on the wild and desolate Faroe Islands, he vows to sever all ties with his previous life. He desperately wants to make a new start, and is surprised by how quickly he is welcomed into the close-knit community. But still, the terrifying, debilitating nightmares just won’t stop.
Then the solitude is shattered by an almost unheard of crime on the islands: murder. A specialist team of detectives arrives from Denmark to help the local police, who seem completely ill-equipped for an investigation of this scale. But as tensions rise, and the community closes ranks to protect its own, John has to watch his back. But far more disquieting than that, John’s nightmares have taken an even more disturbing turn, and he can’t be certain about the one thing he needs to know above all else. Whether he is the killer …
John Callum is in the Faroe Islands to make a new start. Plagued by nightmares from the life he’s left behind in Glasgow, he slowly settles into the close-knit community – taking a job at a salmon farm and living in a basic shack belonging to the farm’s manager, the religious Martin Hojgaard and his good-hearted wife, Silja. He even starts a relationship with passionate, volatile local artist Karis Lisberg. For a while, life is looking good.
Then he wakes up in the harbour after a heavy night’s drinking and finds a knife in his pocket – a knife covered in someone else’s blood. As John tries to piece together what happened the night before, he learns that a body has been found. With the locals drawing ranks against him and a freshly arrived Danish police team regarding John as their number one suspect, John’s biggest worry is that they might actually be right …
Tartan Noir meets Scandinavian Noir in Craig Robertson’s standalone crime novel whose slow burn plot makes excellent use of its atmospheric setting and its protagonist’s mysterious past. However, the reveal of the killer was a bit of a let-down and didn’t quite make sense in the context of what we’re told while some of John’s actions are incredibly reckless (even when considered in the context of the discoveries we make about his past). I’m a fan of Robertson’s writing - he has a crisp way with description that gives you a sense of both place and violence and kept me turning the pages while there are also some funny lines. However, if this book sparks a series, I’m not honestly sure that I’d read on, although I would always check out Robertson’s other work.
Despite his first person voice, Callum is a mystery for most of the book. His nightmares are violent but it takes a while for the truth to come out and when it did, I did raise my eyebrows a bit. More convincing is his passionate relationship with the dynamic, mercurial Karis who has secrets of her own – I could believe in the mutual attraction between the two as each has a reckless aspect to their personality that would draw the other. The star of the book though is the Faroe Islands themselves, which Robertson does full justice to – beautiful, wild and closed off, it made me want to book a trip there.
The Verdict:
Tartan Noir meets Scandinavian Noir in Craig Robertson’s standalone crime novel whose slow burn plot makes excellent use of its atmospheric setting and its protagonist’s mysterious past. However, the reveal of the killer was a bit of a let-down and didn’t quite make sense in the context of what we’re told while some of John’s actions are incredibly reckless (even when considered in the context of the discoveries we make about his past). I’m a fan of Robertson’s writing - he has a crisp way with description that gives you a sense of both place and violence and kept me turning the pages while there are also some funny lines. However, if this book sparks a series, I’m not honestly sure that I’d read on, although I would always check out Robertson’s other work.
THE LAST REFUGE will be released in the United Kingdom on 22nd May 2014. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book.
Your head is full of muddle, empty of memories.
In your pocket is a grindaknivur, a knife for cutting whale meat.
The blade is coated in someone else’s blood.
You can run from your past but you can never hide from yourself …
When John Callum arrives on the wild and desolate Faroe Islands, he vows to sever all ties with his previous life. He desperately wants to make a new start, and is surprised by how quickly he is welcomed into the close-knit community. But still, the terrifying, debilitating nightmares just won’t stop.
Then the solitude is shattered by an almost unheard of crime on the islands: murder. A specialist team of detectives arrives from Denmark to help the local police, who seem completely ill-equipped for an investigation of this scale. But as tensions rise, and the community closes ranks to protect its own, John has to watch his back. But far more disquieting than that, John’s nightmares have taken an even more disturbing turn, and he can’t be certain about the one thing he needs to know above all else. Whether he is the killer …
John Callum is in the Faroe Islands to make a new start. Plagued by nightmares from the life he’s left behind in Glasgow, he slowly settles into the close-knit community – taking a job at a salmon farm and living in a basic shack belonging to the farm’s manager, the religious Martin Hojgaard and his good-hearted wife, Silja. He even starts a relationship with passionate, volatile local artist Karis Lisberg. For a while, life is looking good.
Then he wakes up in the harbour after a heavy night’s drinking and finds a knife in his pocket – a knife covered in someone else’s blood. As John tries to piece together what happened the night before, he learns that a body has been found. With the locals drawing ranks against him and a freshly arrived Danish police team regarding John as their number one suspect, John’s biggest worry is that they might actually be right …
Tartan Noir meets Scandinavian Noir in Craig Robertson’s standalone crime novel whose slow burn plot makes excellent use of its atmospheric setting and its protagonist’s mysterious past. However, the reveal of the killer was a bit of a let-down and didn’t quite make sense in the context of what we’re told while some of John’s actions are incredibly reckless (even when considered in the context of the discoveries we make about his past). I’m a fan of Robertson’s writing - he has a crisp way with description that gives you a sense of both place and violence and kept me turning the pages while there are also some funny lines. However, if this book sparks a series, I’m not honestly sure that I’d read on, although I would always check out Robertson’s other work.
Despite his first person voice, Callum is a mystery for most of the book. His nightmares are violent but it takes a while for the truth to come out and when it did, I did raise my eyebrows a bit. More convincing is his passionate relationship with the dynamic, mercurial Karis who has secrets of her own – I could believe in the mutual attraction between the two as each has a reckless aspect to their personality that would draw the other. The star of the book though is the Faroe Islands themselves, which Robertson does full justice to – beautiful, wild and closed off, it made me want to book a trip there.
The Verdict:
Tartan Noir meets Scandinavian Noir in Craig Robertson’s standalone crime novel whose slow burn plot makes excellent use of its atmospheric setting and its protagonist’s mysterious past. However, the reveal of the killer was a bit of a let-down and didn’t quite make sense in the context of what we’re told while some of John’s actions are incredibly reckless (even when considered in the context of the discoveries we make about his past). I’m a fan of Robertson’s writing - he has a crisp way with description that gives you a sense of both place and violence and kept me turning the pages while there are also some funny lines. However, if this book sparks a series, I’m not honestly sure that I’d read on, although I would always check out Robertson’s other work.
THE LAST REFUGE will be released in the United Kingdom on 22nd May 2014. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the ARC of this book.
