The Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery Series: Books 1-3
(2026)(A book in the DI Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mysteries series)
An omnibus of novels by Phillip Strang
Three deaths. Three islands. One detective policing the place she swore she'd left behind.
Detective Inspector Cat MacNeil went away to the city and came back with the city still on her, like a smell the islands can't quite place. Now she polices the Outer Hebrides — a world of cockle strands and salmon cages and machair, where everyone knows her mother's name, half of them are kin, and a body on the sand is never a stranger for long.
Collected here for the first time: the first three novels in the acclaimed Hebridean crime series, atmospheric slow-burning mysteries of small islands, close blood, and the cost of doing the job properly.
COCKLE STRAND
A man lies dead on the great tidal beach at Barra, a cockle rake laid neat beside his open hand and the flood already coming in to take the sand. He didn't go out in the black of the night for nothing — so where is what he carried, and who was on the strand with him? Cat's first case back is on the island she grew up on, among people who remember the girl she was and don't trust the woman she's become.
EMIGRANT SANDS
A skull in the machair, a fracture the sea can't explain, and a girl who everyone believed was sent to Canada fifty years ago. As Cat works a death older than she is, she uncovers a lie the whole of South Uist agreed to tell — and learns that on these islands, the ones who "emigrated" didn't always leave.
SLACK WATER
A diver goes down at slack water on a South Uist salmon farm and does not come up. Every man on the boat says the same thing: he fouled himself, it was the sea. But the man standing at the gas panel with the dead diver's air in his hands is Cat's own uncle — and beneath a quarter of a million fish, something is being kept quiet that a dead man was about to say out loud.
For readers of Ann Cleeves, Peter May, and Denzil Meyrick — crime fiction with the salt and the grief of the islands in every line.
Genre: Mystery
Detective Inspector Cat MacNeil went away to the city and came back with the city still on her, like a smell the islands can't quite place. Now she polices the Outer Hebrides — a world of cockle strands and salmon cages and machair, where everyone knows her mother's name, half of them are kin, and a body on the sand is never a stranger for long.
Collected here for the first time: the first three novels in the acclaimed Hebridean crime series, atmospheric slow-burning mysteries of small islands, close blood, and the cost of doing the job properly.
COCKLE STRAND
A man lies dead on the great tidal beach at Barra, a cockle rake laid neat beside his open hand and the flood already coming in to take the sand. He didn't go out in the black of the night for nothing — so where is what he carried, and who was on the strand with him? Cat's first case back is on the island she grew up on, among people who remember the girl she was and don't trust the woman she's become.
EMIGRANT SANDS
A skull in the machair, a fracture the sea can't explain, and a girl who everyone believed was sent to Canada fifty years ago. As Cat works a death older than she is, she uncovers a lie the whole of South Uist agreed to tell — and learns that on these islands, the ones who "emigrated" didn't always leave.
SLACK WATER
A diver goes down at slack water on a South Uist salmon farm and does not come up. Every man on the boat says the same thing: he fouled himself, it was the sea. But the man standing at the gas panel with the dead diver's air in his hands is Cat's own uncle — and beneath a quarter of a million fish, something is being kept quiet that a dead man was about to say out loud.
For readers of Ann Cleeves, Peter May, and Denzil Meyrick — crime fiction with the salt and the grief of the islands in every line.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Phillip Strang's The Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery Series: Books 1-3