False Tide: A Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery

Nobody drowns on a falling tide. Four hours a day, the North Ford is ground. The rest of the time it is under six feet of black water.When an old man is found face down in four inches of it at dawn, everyone on North Uist says the same thing in the same words: he knew that ford better than any man living, and it is always the ones who know it. DI Cat MacNeil writes it in her report and believes it for three weeks.Then a constable and a set of tide tables prove it could not have happened. The water was going away from him the whole time he lay there. There was no tide to misjudge.Cat is a Uist woman policing an island where her name buys her nothing, and the more she is right, the fewer doors are open to her. What she finds is a community trust bled quietly for nine years, a dead chairman whose signature is on every page of it, and a young bookkeeper whom everybody agrees went to Glasgow one January, and whose mother has been telling people otherwise ever since.Nobody lied to her. That is the worst of it. An island can hand you a false thing in good faith, and go on handing it to you every day, and be entirely certain - about a tide, about a thief, about a boy.Fourth in the DI Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mysteries. Each book stands alone.