Slack Water: A Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798189307379)

On a flat calm morning at slack water, a diver goes into the loch and does not come up.

Dougie MacMillan was thirty-four, with a wife working the shop at Iochdar and a child at home. He went down at cage four on the turn of the tide, the one hour in six when a man can work between two nets. Twenty-two minutes of CPR on a wet deck did not bring him back.

Every man on that boat says the same thing. He fouled himself. It was the sea.

Detective Inspector Cat MacNeil has been three years home on South Uist, policing an island she swore she would never see again. She knows every house on that shore and every wage that comes off that water.

She also knows the man who was standing at the gas panel with Dougie's air in his hands.

He is her mother's brother.

The post-mortem will not call it an accident or anything else. A compressor ran forty-three hours that nobody can account for. And beneath a quarter of a million fish, on a loch where families draw a wage, something is being kept quiet that a dead man was about to say out loud.

Cat can follow it all the way down. She just cannot follow it and stay.

Slack Water is the third Cat MacNeil Hebridean Mystery - a slow-burning crime novel of small islands, close blood, and what it costs to do the job properly.