Douglas Skelton (2024) The Hollow Mountain.

‘A murder that wasn’t a murder.’ That’s the tagline. A Rebecca Connolly mystery. I don’t think I’ve read any other in this series. I was pretty sure I’d figured out who the murdered that wasn’t the murderer was. Like the Brexit result, I was wrong.

Small margins. Leave or Remain? I voted to Leave England but remain in Europe. Most of Scotland voted for the latter, but not the former. Very few, then or now, voted in the Tories. The moron’s moron Trump was in the White House shaking hands with the odious Nigel Farage. Here we have the Farage simulacrum, Finbar Dalgleish. A lawyer, turned right-wing politician and nationalist.

‘Sleekit,’ was also a term applied to John Lane also known as Bronco Lane who worked as a ganger in the Ceuchan, Hydro-Electric Project above Loch Awe in the late fifties and early sixties, but had links with Mosley and other right-wing fascists that infiltrated modern politics. He is the prime suspect in the murder that wasn’t a murder of Gerry Rawlins.

A dual timeline. Past and present.

Three feisty former reporters offer their answers. Alice Larkin, ‘yesterday’s news’. Read the headlines in Reporting Scotland. She grew up in the swinging sixties, knows all the answers. She’s the daughter of Sir Broderick Larkin, a former press baron who owned a large chunk of the Highlands. As a reporter, she goes against the grain. Not only gathering the facts. ‘Comforting the afflicted, afflict the comfortable’.

Her approach matches that of Rebecca Connolly and her boss, who writes and makes true-crime documentaries and podcasts, Elsbeth McTaggart, who worked as a journalist in the Glasgow in the seventies but also for The Highland Chronicle.      

Alice Larkin has something to say. She’s written it all down and doles it out to Rebecca and Elspeth piecemeal. It frustrates them, but she knows the story has a hook and telling it becomes addictive. Danger doesn’t push them away but closer to the truth.

Rebecca reflects, ‘We’ve been threatened before. Elsbeth always says if we aren’t threatened, cajoled, side-tracked or lied to at least once when following a story then it’s not worth doing’.

In other words, my kind of journalists. I was chuffed that I already knew who the ‘tunnel tigers’ were. I’d read an autobiography of an Irish labourer that had worked on the hydroelectric project and lived in a Nissan hut like thousands of others. The British government used to invest in its people and make things which may surprise younger readers. The Ceuchan Project cost around £24.5 million then. Around £500 million nowadays. A great backdrop for a murder mystery. Read on.

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