Peat and Bone

About Peat and Bone

The road to the Munro estate narrows to a single track long before it arrives, and the Highland February that Sylvie Maren drives through is the kind that makes no promises about the weather, the light, or how long GPS will hold. The property is a Victorian shooting lodge above a sea loch, applying for certification from an organization it barely understands, surrounded by blanket bog that stretches inland until it disappears into cloud. The family is complicated.

The estate is more complicated. And the woman who was doing ecological research on the western moor has been missing for three days. The bog keeps things.

That is its nature — to preserve what the world puts into it, slowly, over thousands of years. When the investigation opens, it opens into layers: a planning application filed months before anyone admitted knowing about it, a researcher whose careful work threatened the wrong people, and a landscape that holds evidence the way it holds everything else, which is to say precisely and without judgment. Sylvie works the case through the methodical rhythms of a Highland week — walking the moor paths, reading the land's record alongside its community's, and navigating a family in which the most dangerous person is also the most careful.