DCI Daley digs up Gigha’s war secrets
DENZIL Meyrick’s fifth DCI Daley novel, The Well of the Winds, launched at the Gigha Hotel on Saturday, on the Hebridean island where the crime thriller is set.
Around 50 people from Gigha, Campbeltown, Kintyre and further afield gathered to hear Meyrick discuss the new book with author and journalist Freddy Gillies.
Meyrick, who grew up in Campbeltown but now lives with his wife Fiona on Loch Lomondside, has sold more than 250,000 copies in the detective series. His detective protagonist DCI Jim Daley first appeared in Whisky from Small Glasses in 2012, and then The Last Witness, Dark Suits and Sad Songs and The Rat Stone Serenade.
The latest thriller, based on historical events, begins with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of a Gigha family; the case leads Jim Daley and his deputy DS Brian Scott to start looking into some curious goings-on in wartime Argyll.
The book’s publisher, Polygon, explains: ‘Argyll, perennially remote yet abuzz with military activity in the 1940s, is a landscape that hoards secrets. In the kind of tight-knit communities in which people know each other’s business but let each other alone, Daley’s tenacious nose for a story uncovers a tale of world-historical significance.
‘On the small island of Gairsay, off the Kintyre peninsula, the local post man cum - police and fire officer discovers that the Bremner family have vanished from their farm. There’s a pot on the stove and food on the table, but no sign of three generations of a family long-believed to be Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
‘A World War II mystery is revealed as investigations begin and various branches of the security services take an interest in the case. When DCI Daley comes into possession of a journal written by his wartime predecessor in Kinloch, Inspector William Urquhart, he soon realises Gairsay (a fictionalised Isle of Gigha) has many secrets.
‘Assisted by his indomitable deputy, DS Brian Scott, and new boss, Chief Superintendent Carrie Symington, Daley finds that he must solve a wartime murder to reveal not only the shocking events of the past, but new horrors of the present.’
Saturday’s book launch on Gigha heard sales of Meyrick novella, Dalintober Moon, have raised more than £3,000 for the Daltintober Beach restoration project in Campbeltown.