Jim had lured the Watcher out on the seas. Jim had shaken the shadows.
If the sentences above intrigue you, this book may be for you. If they leave you shrugging and wondering where the plot is, then you may be best advised to read something else.
What’s it about?
Sam is seven when she realises that her dad isn’t really a policeman in the conventional sense, but she’s eighteen when her role as ‘the third man’ comes alive…
Sam scanned the hill ridge behind, searching for the brief flare of a match, the warning cry of a crow. Nothing. It must have been the breeze. She was imagining things; Jim had lured the Watcher out on the seas. Jim had shaken the shadows.
‘Orkney Twilight’ begins slowly with a lot of suspicion from Sam and some drunken ramblings from her dad, Jim, at her eighteenth birthday celebrations. Sam is used to treating everything Jim says with a liberal dose of salt, but when her mum asks her to travel with him on a trip to the Orkney Islands, she finds herself unable to refuse. Fundamentally this is a tale of a father-daughter relationship, but it is also a spy thriller which only really starts two thirds of the way through the book.
What’s it like?
Atmospheric, slow-paced and packed with odd relationships. Why Sam chooses to take Tom, a wannabe journalist, with her on a trip where she knows her father will be operating clandestinely is puzzling, but possibly no more puzzling than her relationship with any member of her family. Her dad clearly operates independently of the rest of the family and her mum’s attitude towards him only hardens after a shocking event that she seems surprisingly uninterested in.
The most interesting elements for me were the passages about the islands and about the Greenham Common Peace Camp, a place where Sam spent significant time as a child, but I’m never really interested in spy stories and for much of the book you could dismiss Sam as being paranoid. When that changes, it’s so abrupt a shift in gears that I had to reread a couple of pages to verify what had just happened.
Final thoughts
I read this as part of my crime reading book group’s look at ‘Scottish crime fiction’. It was atmospheric but I was surprised to learn subsequently that this is the starting point of a trilogy. I don’t feel inspired to try the next book in the series, but I’ve no specific criticisms; I think this just wasn’t my kind of story.