The Lighthouse Keeper's Log
(2026)(The seventh book in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series)
A Story by Phillip Strang
A retired lighthouse keeper is found dead at the foot of Cantick Head, on the southern shore of Hoy. The fall could have been an accident. The wind, the path, the position of the body say otherwise.
In his rucksack, Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch finds something stranger than the death: a reconstructed page from the Cantick Head logbook for the night of 5 June 1952, a night the keeper had been quietly trying to put back into the record for the last twenty years of his life. What he had found, the official report did not say. What he had been writing was the official report intended to conceal.
To read the case, Freya has to read what an Orcadian community has held in silence for seventy-six years: a vanished vessel, a survivor who would not speak of it, the families left along the south shore of Hoy, and the keeper who had inked over his own pencilled truth on a stormy night when two boats went out and only one came back.
With her constable Billy Flett at her shoulder and the harbourmaster Magnus Flett's long memory of the Sound to draw on, Freya works the path, the logbook, and the families through nine cold days of late March, between the Stromness ferry and the Longhope lanes, in a wind that backs from west to south-west and comes back again to the west by the end.
For readers of Ann Cleeves and Peter May. The seventh in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series; reads as a standalone.
The Lighthouse Keeper's Log — a quiet, weather-anchored detective novel about a death at a lighthouse, a record that was never made, and what an island remembers when its keepers stop being asked.
Genre: Mystery
In his rucksack, Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch finds something stranger than the death: a reconstructed page from the Cantick Head logbook for the night of 5 June 1952, a night the keeper had been quietly trying to put back into the record for the last twenty years of his life. What he had found, the official report did not say. What he had been writing was the official report intended to conceal.
To read the case, Freya has to read what an Orcadian community has held in silence for seventy-six years: a vanished vessel, a survivor who would not speak of it, the families left along the south shore of Hoy, and the keeper who had inked over his own pencilled truth on a stormy night when two boats went out and only one came back.
With her constable Billy Flett at her shoulder and the harbourmaster Magnus Flett's long memory of the Sound to draw on, Freya works the path, the logbook, and the families through nine cold days of late March, between the Stromness ferry and the Longhope lanes, in a wind that backs from west to south-west and comes back again to the west by the end.
For readers of Ann Cleeves and Peter May. The seventh in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series; reads as a standalone.
The Lighthouse Keeper's Log — a quiet, weather-anchored detective novel about a death at a lighthouse, a record that was never made, and what an island remembers when its keepers stop being asked.
Genre: Mystery