Amy Myers is known for her short stories and historical novels featuring Victorian chef Auguste Didier and chimney sweep Tom Wasp. Her contemporary series feature ex-cop Peter Marsh and Daughter and classic car detective Jack Colby, and she is currently working on a new series starring Cara Shelley who runs a café in the grounds of stately home Tanton Towers.
Website: www.amymyers.net
This mesmerising spy thriller is the conclusion of a trilogy, though I didn’t realise this fact while reading it. The story, featuring the same protagonist, Sam Coyle, stands alone. I shall now make haste to read its predecessors. All three books are set in the Orkney Islands, which cast an atmospheric spell over both the characters within and the reader.
Sam Coyle and her sisters grew up in a dysfunctional family dominated by their irascible father Jim, who worked as a police spy in south London. Then in the hot summer of 1976 one of his contacts, Pierce, brings his heavily pregnant wife and daughter Anna to stay. He needs a refuge for them while he goes off on a mission. During the summer Sam and the enigmatic Anna bond and swear to be blood sisters. But Sam doesn’t see either Pierce or Anna again for thirteen years, and in the meantime her father has died.
Now in 1989 Sam is drawn back to the island of Hoy remembering childhood holidays there with Jim, but the past catches up with her when she sees The Fisher King, her name for Pierce taken from the Celtic folklore of the islands. It is a fateful meeting leading to a quest that plunges her into the complex world of MI5 and MI6 during the troubled time that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sam is an engaging and convincing protagonist throughout and the plot-line and setting of The Dark Isle would have made it a good thriller in itself; but by imbedding it deeply into the Celtic folklore of the Orkney Islands, the author has added another dimension.
This is a book to be savored, like a fine wine.
