The Stronsay Vote
(2026)(The tenth book in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
Stronsay votes on Tuesday. Edith Stout will not be at the meeting.
A retired teacher is found at the foot of a slipway on the small Orkney island of Stronsay, her shopping bag two yards above her on the dry concrete. Five days before a council vote that will divide the island, the one voice no one could quite predict has been taken out of it.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch comes across from Stromness on the morning Loganair. The case has the shape of a row over land — three landowners on one side, a quiet anti-development group on the other, a Glasgow company and an access easement worth a great deal of money. The interviews give her three accounts that fit. None of them quite gives her what she is looking for.
What she finds in the cooperage's historical record, in a redacted paragraph and a paper not yet committed to the file, is older than the development by sixty years. The thing the island had been keeping quiet was kept quiet for a reason, and Edith Stout had begun to ask the questions that came nearest to it.
The work of the case is in the rooms it has to be done in: a community council, three kitchens at three different farms, an archivist's reading room in Kirkwall, and a Sunday afternoon at a writing bureau Freya has been putting off for twelve years.
Some things wait. Some things are waited out. The hearing is on Thursday.
The Stronsay Vote is the tenth in Phillip Strang's Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series — quiet, restrained, atmospheric crime fiction set in the islands at the top of Scotland.
Genre: Mystery
A retired teacher is found at the foot of a slipway on the small Orkney island of Stronsay, her shopping bag two yards above her on the dry concrete. Five days before a council vote that will divide the island, the one voice no one could quite predict has been taken out of it.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch comes across from Stromness on the morning Loganair. The case has the shape of a row over land — three landowners on one side, a quiet anti-development group on the other, a Glasgow company and an access easement worth a great deal of money. The interviews give her three accounts that fit. None of them quite gives her what she is looking for.
What she finds in the cooperage's historical record, in a redacted paragraph and a paper not yet committed to the file, is older than the development by sixty years. The thing the island had been keeping quiet was kept quiet for a reason, and Edith Stout had begun to ask the questions that came nearest to it.
The work of the case is in the rooms it has to be done in: a community council, three kitchens at three different farms, an archivist's reading room in Kirkwall, and a Sunday afternoon at a writing bureau Freya has been putting off for twelve years.
Some things wait. Some things are waited out. The hearing is on Thursday.
The Stronsay Vote is the tenth in Phillip Strang's Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series — quiet, restrained, atmospheric crime fiction set in the islands at the top of Scotland.
Genre: Mystery