On a weather?beaten rock forty miles west of the Hebrides, they still call Skarav ‘Island of the Dead’ – a place of sheer cliffs, vanished communities and secrets buried as deep as the graves in its thin soil. When burned?out Glasgow journalist Ethan MacGregor returns there for the first time in fourteen years, it is not for the scenery but an ultimatum: face what happened the night his first love fell from the island’s highest cliff, or lose his wife and baby daughter. At seventeen, Donna Gillies was fearless, barefoot and the only girl Ethan ever truly loved – until she died on a moonlit August night, pregnant and broken on the rocks below a headland called The Saddle. The island has never doubted who killed her: Christopher MacGregor, Ethan’s devout father. On the mainland, Detective George Gunn is also haunted by that night: by the body he helped gather in pieces from the rocks, and the post?mortem that proved Donna was struck with a tubular weapon before she went over the edge. A recent cliff?top suicide has shattered the fragile lid he kept on those memories, and when word reaches him that Ethan is back on St. Columba, Gunn seizes on the case review as his last chance at redemption. As a storm season closes in, Ethan and Gunn follow different paths back to The Saddle, through traumatised families, the politics of a shrinking island, and the dangerous loyalties of a group of friends who once believed they would all escape.