The Funeral at Birsay
(2026)(Book 11 in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
A quiet parish. A thirty-year silence. And a funeral that should never have mattered.
When a sixty-year-old crofter's wife is found beaten in her kitchen at Marwick, Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch expects a domestic tragedy with a short list of suspects. Joan Sinclair has no enemies, no debts, and nothing taken from the smallholding. She survives the airlift to Kirkwall — but she cannot, or will not, say what happened.
Then a second islander is attacked the same week, in the same way, miles across the West Mainland. Two victims. No connection anyone in the parish will admit to. And a single faded photograph, tucked at the back of a kitchen drawer, of a small religious community that closed its doors more than thirty years ago.
As Freya works back through old kirk records, a retired civil servant's unpublished memoir, and the careful evasions of a parish that protects its own, the case stops being about the present at all. Someone in Birsay has spent three decades keeping a death quiet. Someone has decided, at last, that two people know too much.
The closer Freya comes to the truth of what happened at the community in 1992, the clearer it becomes that the most respected man in the parish has the most to lose ''' and that the funeral at Birsay was never the ending. It was the beginning.
The Funeral at Birsay is the eleventh Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery — a slow-burning, atmospheric procedural for readers who love sharp detection, vivid island settings, and a long-buried secret unravelled one careful conversation at a time. Each book reads as a standalone.
Genre: Mystery
When a sixty-year-old crofter's wife is found beaten in her kitchen at Marwick, Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch expects a domestic tragedy with a short list of suspects. Joan Sinclair has no enemies, no debts, and nothing taken from the smallholding. She survives the airlift to Kirkwall — but she cannot, or will not, say what happened.
Then a second islander is attacked the same week, in the same way, miles across the West Mainland. Two victims. No connection anyone in the parish will admit to. And a single faded photograph, tucked at the back of a kitchen drawer, of a small religious community that closed its doors more than thirty years ago.
As Freya works back through old kirk records, a retired civil servant's unpublished memoir, and the careful evasions of a parish that protects its own, the case stops being about the present at all. Someone in Birsay has spent three decades keeping a death quiet. Someone has decided, at last, that two people know too much.
The closer Freya comes to the truth of what happened at the community in 1992, the clearer it becomes that the most respected man in the parish has the most to lose ''' and that the funeral at Birsay was never the ending. It was the beginning.
The Funeral at Birsay is the eleventh Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery — a slow-burning, atmospheric procedural for readers who love sharp detection, vivid island settings, and a long-buried secret unravelled one careful conversation at a time. Each book reads as a standalone.
Genre: Mystery