It’s exhausting, all my contemporaries were retiring so I thought, why can’t I retire? I wanted to read for pleasure and to get involved in music, which is the other big thing in my life. The story mainly takes place in 2051, when global warming has devasted our planet. Much of the earth is underwater, with coastal regions wiped out. Elsewhere, central inland areas have become too hot to be habitable. Millions of people are on the move as refugees, trying to escape famine and flooding. Immigration is causing war and political turmoil. Melting ice has stopped the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, resulting in northern Europe, including Scotland, being hit by raging blizzards and ice storms. Peter is determined to do his bit to halt the climate crisis, and says modestly: “I thought well, I have got perhaps a little louder voice than some people. The only thing I can do is make that noise heard above the roar of denial.” When the body of investigative journalist George Younger is discovered entombed in an ice tunnel in the Mamore Forest, veteran Glasgow detective Cameron Brodie volunteers to investigate. However, the investigation is just an ostensible reason; primarily he wishes to reconcile with the woman who discovered the body, his estranged daughter, Addie. The two haven’t spoken for over ten years, since the death of Brodie’s wife, Mel. Peter kindly agreed to answer a few questions on what inspired him to write this futuristic “cli-fi” novel.

It’s not just the weather that provides the chills in ‘A Winter Grave’ - this is a remote Scottish Highland village, cut off by extreme weather conditions, no means of communication, a killer that clearly knows the landscape, and uses it to his advantage, a rollercoaster of emotions for Brodie and Addie, lots of twists and turns, utter fear at times, and a completely gripping storyline. Highly recommended! A good read but I think it was more about me not getting absorbed by the novel than it not been a good book. I have always enjoyed this authors writing and even though I wasn’t fully convinced by this novel I still enjoyed it. The dead man is investigative reporter George Younger, who’d been missing for three months. What he’d been doing on a mountain top is a mystery, as those who knew him said he wasn’t an experienced hill walker at all. A Winter Grave takes place in the not-too-distant future, in 2051. It begins with the discovery of the body of an investigative reporter.

Peter’s dream was always to be an author but he says that option didn’t seem to be on the cards in his school days. “In the late 1960s there was no career path to becoming a writer,” he points out. The outcome of COP26 left him dismayed. “I thought ‘these people all know what the situation is, but there are more fossil fuel lobbyists at these COP conferences than there are representatives from the developing world’. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades spreading disinformation and scepticism. A young meteorologist takes a work based trek up a mountain and is faced with a dead body, frozen in ice. This chance discovery leads to a rollercoaster of secrets and intrigue and the body count starts to mount in this bleak and remote landscape.

At the end of it, I thought I have got to write about this, and the problem was how. I don’t want to preach to people so I decided so I would write a conventional thriller and set it 30 years in the future and the world would just be changed by the climate crisis.” Time hop Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy.

Contacts are key

Keen to bring this to people’s attention, and wanting to put it in a readable format, Peter decided to use his skills as a journalist to embark on some in-depth research of his own and then use some of what he found within a crime thriller. He decided to set the story almost thirty years from now, in a world transformed by a changing climate. A Winter Grave is not an easy read; the near future is quite bleak so to say, in more than one meaning. It is, however, a great dystopian thriller which will set you thinking. Unusually for the painstaking researcher, Covid travel restrictions meant Peter wasn’t able to get to Scotland. Cameron Brodie is an experienced policeman who’s just received a devastating health prognosis. As a keen hillwalker, he is asked to fly to the village to ascertain whether the death was accidental, or more sinister. It is the year 2051. Warnings of climate catastrophe have been ignored, and vast areas of the planet are under water, or uninhabitably hot. A quarter of the world's population has been displaced by hunger and flooding, and immigration wars are breaking out around the globe as refugees pour into neighboring countries.