Now permanently resettled on the island of his birth in the Outer Hebrides, ex-Detective Inspector Fin Macleod has been employed by a local landowner to oversee security on a sizeable estate. This should be a fairly straightforward task for someone of Fin’s experience, but the occasional theft of a salmon for the family table he remembers from his youth has given way to a far more organised and wide-scale criminal enterprise. Not to mention that the Rocky, undulating backcountry on the storm-swept Isle of Lewis is daunting terrain, even for a native son.
His security detail at the Red River Estate brings Fin into contact with elusive local poacher and former school friend Whistler Macaskill. As Fin pursues Whistler across the moors, they are forced into temporary shelter by a massive storm. When they emerge the next morning, they are greeted by the aftermath of a freak natural phenomenon- a ‘bog burst’ - that has drain an entire loch of its water, revealing a mud-encased light aircraft in its wake.
Struggling through the muck, Fin and Whistler are appalled by what they find inside : the body of their friend and former band mate Roddy Mackenzie, whose single-prop plane disappeared in the area more than seventeen years earlier - just as Roddy was becoming an international rock star. Worse, the condition of the skeletal remains makes it clear Roddy was murdered rather than killed in the crash.
As he closes in on the truth behind the death of Roddy MacKenzie, Fin is confronted by the hosts of his youth - and by the painful and unexpected ways in which the events of the past have warped the contours of the present.
