Undiscovered Scotland

 

"The Hollow Mountain" by Douglas Skelton is the sixth in the author's series of thrillers featuring Inverness-based journalist Rebecca Connolly. It is also, by some margin, the best: which is no mean feat as we've enjoyed all of its predecessors.

"The Hollow Mountain" is a book that is hard to review without spoiling: there are seismic twists and turns that it would be all too easy to give away. I'll therefore outline the story by falling back on the reviewer's easy standby, the blurb on the rear cover, though even this reveals something left veiled within the book until you are quite some way through the story: "The Tunnel Tigers were an elite group of construction workers who specialised in a lucrative but hazardous profession – blasting tunnels through mountains and under rivers, in dangerous conditions few men could endure. Alice Larkin, the headstrong daughter of a millionaire and former news reporter, claims her lover, a Tunnel Tiger, died in mysterious circumstances many years ago, and she wants journalist Rebecca Connolly to investigate. Intrigued, Rebecca throws herself into investigating the story, but she soon comes face to face with an old adversary. Family legacies and influential reputations are at stake – and danger is shockingly close to home."

What I particularly enjoyed was that the book is not just about a mystery, it actually is a mystery. As a reader, I found myself getting ever deeper into the story without any clear idea of where it was going or even what it was really about. That might normally be considered a negative comments, but here it simply leaves the reader increasingly intrigued, increasingly keen to discover what lies behind the task that Rebecca has been presented with. I've commented before on Douglas Skelton's outstanding ability to misdirect his readers and in this book he has turned that into an art form. The two strands of the story, separated in time by six decades, weave together beautifully as the book builds towards its shocking climax.

This is a book I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in a superbly crafted Scottish thriller. While it is the sixth in the series, you don't need to have read any of the others in order to enjoy this one: though if that's what you do, you should expect to emerge from the book wanting to read its predecessors.