Crow Moon

Suzy Aspley

(Orenda, £9.99)

Crow Moon meets the definition of “eagerly-awaited” more than most debuts. First-time author Suzy Aspley’s original idea won Pitch Perfect at the 2019 Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival in Stirling, so those who were there will no doubt be delighted to see it finally in print.

The novel introduces Martha Strangeways, formerly a high-flying journalist until a fire tore through her house, killing her three-year-old twins. She hasn’t worked since then, and lives with her teenage son, Dougie, as they both try to come to terms with their loss. Their new home in Strathbran is only a few miles from where the tragedy occurred, a hill called the Blacklaw, topped by a moondial which commemorates the execution of an accused witch called Feannag Dhubh.

While walking her dogs, Martha stumbles across the dead body of one of her son’s friends, Fraser, the discovery made even more macabre by the fact that his killer has written a stanza from a poem about Feannag Dhubh on the boy’s back. The shock jolts Martha back into action, and she offers her journalistic skills and local knowledge to the police to help them track down the killer, hopefully before any more of the village’s young people suffer the same fate.

It appears that Fraser’s death, and another subsequent disappearance, is somehow linked to a ritual attempted at the moondial almost exactly a year earlier, on the night of the Crow Moon, a ritual that seems to have somehow gone wrong and had unintended consequences. And if that’s the case then Martha’s son, Dougie, may be next on the list. With the next Crow Moon only a few days away, there’s little time to lose.

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Scattered between chapters are entries from an old journal, The Book of Shadows, the disturbing memoir of a woman who came over from Denmark to Aberfoyle to marry a local man. “He must not know that the ones I pray to are not his own gods and saints,” she writes, ominously, later to reveal that she’s leaving in fear for herself and her child and that events are spiralling out of control.

As the night of the Crow Moon draws nearer, the figure who has been menacing the village of Strathbran is close to completing his plan, driven by forces which may be purely in his imagination or may be some dark and vengeful spiritual entity unleashed by the moondial ritual. Martha is the relatable emotional anchor in the midst of it all, trying to learn how to live after suffering unimaginable loss and forced to engage with the world again in the most dramatic way, to prevent another tragedy and keep her son out of danger.

Originally from the north-east of England, Suzy Aspley has lived in Scotland for the past 30 years and seems to have forged a deep connection with the area around the Trossachs and Loch Lomond. The story and its characters feel bound to the landscape, and with the story being set in March one can picture only too easily the grey skies, feel the chill in the air and the damp underfoot. The constant presence of crows (“She’d heard it said that crows were the souls of murder victims; that they warned of evil to come.”), watching, listening, gathering and even swooping down to attack, infuses the already sinister atmosphere with a dash of the Gothic.

There’s a growing body of Scottish thrillers intermingling aspects of the crime genre and the occult, and this atmospheric debut suggests that Suzy Apsley has an instinctive feel for it.