Yet another great read from Peter May- and a request for Audible to complete Peter May collections

Think this is my favorite to date. Peter Forbes does an excellent job with narration. Now if we can just get Audible and Peter May's publisher to make audiobooks of the early books in all of his series, we can all enjoy his complete works!

13 people found this helpful

Enjoyable once I adjusted my expectations

Peter May writes really good stories with a strong sense of time, place and character. Entry Island continues that tradition but not as consistently as his outstanding Lewis Trilogy.

Dual story lines examine a current time murder mystery and the immigration story a century earlier of the ancestors of present day characters. The historical story line is by far the more engaging, perhaps because of May’s obvious connection with the Hebredian locale. Here the story could be better described as historical fiction, but it didn’t bother me because May was able to make me care about the fate of the characters while painting a vivid backdrop of Scottish class politics that drove the mass emigrations.

The murder mystery was not as well developed, with inept and unbelievable police investigations and too many red herrings. As a police procedural it left too much to chance for credibility and the lead detective’s relationship problems made the story lose focus multiple times.

That said, I still found this book highly engaging and hard to put down. The reading by Peter Forbes was excellent because of his ability to use accents and voice inflections to give individual identities to a wide range of characters. The strength of place and character of the ancestral story more than made up for the mystery weaknesses and I can give it a solid 4 star recommendation, unless what you really want is an intense mystery/thriller.

24 people found this helpful

Wonderful!

This is the fourth Peter May book that I have read, and it may be my favorite, although all have been wonderful.. The history, the characters, the settings...all were amazing. I found no difficulty, as other reviewers have, keeping up with the change from present to past. The narrator is great, all of the accents seeming flawless. I found that I had to keep going to Google Earth to look up Entry Island and Lewis Island and dream about the places where the story took place. Don't miss this one!

9 people found this helpful

Story is full of holes. Narrator is maddening.

The novel switches between a bleak island in Canada, where a man has been murdered, in the present, to a period in the mid-1800s that takes place in the Hebrides and, later, in Canada. The modern-day mystery is full of holes. All the police, including the hero, come out as total idiots. The narrator, who has a nice enough voice when simply relating events and when rendering the nineteenth-century Scottish dialogues, really loses it on modern-day Canadian speech, inventing a pinched, nasal accent that is hard on the ears and, I imagine, insulting to any Canadian. And there is a lot of such dialogue. I was on the point of returning the "book" on that basis alone, but didn't have time to find something else. It DID get me through eleven or so hours (not, obviously, in one go) on the treadmill.

6 people found this helpful

Great narration - fortunately

Where does Entry Island rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

While a compelling listen, the dual story line gets tedious as the historic, remote story is more romance than mystery. The audio is saved by Forbes who does three separate accents and helps the listener keep track of the respective stories.

Have you listened to any of Peter Forbes’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I will certainly look for other books narrated by Forbes.

Any additional comments?

The historical background of the enclosures in Scotland and settling of 19C Canada are very well done and I learned quite a bit. The descriptions of the Hebrides and the Magdelaine Islands made me put those places on my travel list as places I might like to visit.

6 people found this helpful

Peter May links two stories across time and space

Peter May, who is a great storyteller, weaves two stories together in this book, one set in 1800s Scotland (and Canada), and the other a present-day murder mystery in Canada.

I enjoyed both stories, and learned some interesting history. But I felt that the device May used to bridge the two stories, “the diaries,” were too detailed and well written (in English—not their author’s native language) to be believable as the work of a minimally educated crofter’s son in 1847 Scotland.

As to the modern-day murder mystery, the police seemed pretty incompetent—not following up on alibis, and being quick to dismiss potential suspects. I guessed who did it long before they did. And I doubt anyone could function at all with the severity and duration of Sime’s insomnia.

Still, the stories are worth hearing, and the narrator, Peter Forbes, does a wonderful job of bringing the characters to life.

5 people found this helpful

Not my favorite from this author

There was just too much going on - an ex wife on the investigation team, insomnia, possible child abuse, and lonnnnng passages about why he had feelings for a murder suspect. I finally skipped about a third of the book and finished it up. I don’t think I missed much.

3 people found this helpful

Real writing

Even as I enjoy so many books in the "mystery" genre, I do eventually crave books that are spectacularly written. Peter May is my current delight. It is partly his love of the bleak landscapes he gives us and his interwoven, interlocking generations, which he so successfully evokes that make his best books ( and this is one) so rich and substantial.

3 people found this helpful

Maybe Two Books?

There's a modern mystery in this, a police procedural concerning the murder of a Canadian. His wife becomes the main suspect, and the unhappy investigating officer senses a strange familiarity about her.

This ties in with the second story (and my favorite). Our investigator Sime has a Scottish ancestor whose journals form some of the book's chapters. Although the Irish potato famine is more familiar to most of us, it was also devastating to the Gaels in Northern Scotland and became an excuse to starve or drive out tenant farmers there as well. Our 19th century hero is one of these, and his heartrending story of strife in Scotland, a forced emigration to Canada, and his attempt to resettle and rebuild a life there is riveting.

What is not so successful are the increasingly improbable coincidences that connect these stories and their characters.

I loved the historical aspect of this book - the journals are well-written, beautiful and affecting, but the author's contrivance in tying the two stories together leads (at least for this listener) to an unacceptable degree of sentimentality and ultimate disbelief.

Can't say I'm sorry I used a credit for this, but I think it might have been better to form two books from the material.

7 people found this helpful

Extremely Good, Exciting and Educational.

Two deeply engrossing stories run interwoven until they collide in this extremely interesting novel. Three mysteries are presented by Peter May. 1) who killed the rich husband, 2) what happened to two Scottish sweethearts 160 yrs ago and 3) how do these stories help solve the murder. All aspects of this mystery/saga are
enjoyable and some very gripping. The mystery is challenging and the story of the forebears unforgettable. Five star rating all the way. Mike

3 people found this helpful