The Bookpage Reviews The Wolf Tree
Reviewed by Linda Castellitto
Detective Inspector Georgina “George” Lennox is still on the mend eight months after nearly dying in an on-the-job accident in Glasgow, Scotland. And as Laura McCluskey’s eerie, gothic-tinged debut mystery, The Wolf Tree, opens, the impetuous, recently promoted 28-year-old is eager to ditch desk duty and get back out in the field with her partner, veteran DI Richie Stewart.
Their superintendent is open to the idea, but wants George to start with an open-and-shut case: Confirm the manner of death for 18-year-old Alan Ferguson, presumed to have died by suicide on Eilean Eadar, a remote island in the North Atlantic Ocean. “[N]othing happens out there,” the superintendent says. “Those islands are medieval time capsules with a population of relics.”
Postmistress Kathy McKinnon effusively welcomes the detectives to Eilean Eadar for their five-day stay, but the other 206 residents aren’t so friendly. Hostile stares and whispers abound, as do evasive answers to straightforward questions, which sets George’s instincts pinging. If everyone’s as close-knit as they claim, united by enduring the challenges of life on a barren island forgotten by the mainland, why not help the DIs put Alan to rest?
George is also intrigued by the island’s dark history: In 1919, three lighthouse keepers went missing and the case was never resolved—a state of affairs about which the islanders seem strangely sanguine. And while a few locals eventually soften toward the detectives, George’s unease remains, exacerbated by the darkness that blankets the island every afternoon, making excursions creepy and treacherous. Her persistent insomnia and migraines aren’t helping either, especially since it’s getting harder to hide them (and the pills she’s taking) from a concerned Richie.
And then there are the howling sounds she hears at night, her growing conviction there’s much more to Alan’s sad story and a massive approaching storm that boosts The Wolf Tree’s escalating tension to even greater heights. Thanks to McCluskey’s expert melding of modern crime procedural and ancient folklore, suspenseful slow burns and intense high-stakes action, fans of stories set in closed communities with something to hide will revel in this assured and absorbing debut.
The Kirkus Review: The Wolf Tree
A young cop and her weathered partner brave a tempestuous sea crossing to investigate a death in a remote community off the coast of Scotland.
When DI Georgina Lennox and her partner, Richie Stewart, arrive on the island of Eilean Eadar, they are half-chilled to the bone and already known to—and disliked by—most of the people around them. A young man fell to his death from the lighthouse a few weeks before, and they’ve been sent from Glasgow to confirm his death was a suicide.
o a community suspicious of “mainlanders,” a category that includes anyone who can’t trace their bloodline back generations, the two cops are a nuisance at best, a threat at worst, and the unfriendly welcome begins to feel downright hostile when George sees someone outside their cottage at night wearing a wooden wolf mask. She can also hear the howls of wolves, despite the fact that there are none on the island. Still recovering from a near-death experience on the job eight months prior, George is dealing with her own trauma, and her tendency to self-medicate in order to keep the headaches at bay.
Five days in the salt-crusted, fish-centered village leads to little clarification about Alan Ferguson’s death, but a whole lot of new mysteries, including the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1919.
Even if a remote, insular Catholic island guided by a steely-eyed priest sounds like a familiar folk horror set up, McCluskey is masterful at building suspense around a sense of place and a feeling of otherness. And George, fretfully uncomfortable in her skin and her partnership, is a prickly, vulnerable, completely engaging heroine with a cop’s instincts through and through, a stubborn streak that nearly gets her into trouble and the courage to risk herself in the quest for truth.
Idealistic, maybe. But properly gothic as well.
The Big Thrill Discusses The Wolf Tree with Laura McCluskey
By Jody Gerbig
A mystery that opens not with a dead body, but with the ravaging sea and a fresh grave, THE WOLF TREE, by filmmaker and debut mystery writer Lauren McClusky, investigates what happens to a culture left to its own rules.
Not since 1900, when two lighthouse keepers disappeared, has anyone from the mainland investigated a crime on Eileen Eadar, a remote, storm-swept island in the Outer Hebrides. But two Glasgow detectives arrive now to determine whether a young man has died by suicide or under suspicious circumstances.
The atrocious weather and lack of cell or internet service are not the only challenges standing in the detectives’ way, however. From the wolf-masked person outside George and Richie’s nighttime window to the curse laid just outside their front door, the island’s traditional inhabitants seem to want the detectives to go home and take their modern values with them.
But, when a sudden storm forces the islanders to address an ugly truth, no one will be able to bury the past in silence ever again.
Inspired by a real lighthouse mystery, this gothic suspense develops themes both timely and archetypal. In the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Tana French, Laura McClusky’s debut will keep you up at night, even when you aren’t turning pages.
This novel opens with inspector George Lennox battling waves and wind in a boat, arriving to the remote Eileen Eadar. How did you choose to start the novel there?
A woman standing in ankle-deep water on a pitching boat was the first image I had when thinking about this story—before I even knew who she was, where she was going, or why—so I wrote that image down, thinking its struggle might create good tension and a ticking clock right away. Opening with two investigators going to the island where the body has already been buried placed them on the back foot of their investigation. Time has already passed since the crime, and now it is running out.
It takes a certain obsession to sit down and write one’s first novel, about a very specific place and subject. What drew you to Scotland, specifically for your fiction debut?
My granddad was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, so for my entire childhood, I heard all his stories about growing up there. I have always had a keen interest in and attachment to Scotland. I came across the story about the missing Eileen Mor lighthouse keepers and something about that mystery—maybe that I would never know the answer—hooked me. I couldn’t stop thinking about why they might have disappeared and where they went, so I wrote a story around that unknown to answer it myself.
This novel has all the hallmarks of a classic gothic tale. Did you grow up reading Romantic gothic writers, like the Brontё sisters, Shirley Jackson, etc.? How did the gothic setting, including the frigid remote island without internet access, public schooling, and modern amenities, inform the story?
I definitely read the Brontё sisters growing up, but as an adult I just started reading gothic horror, which I was too scared to read as a child, and I realized I have been missing out on brilliant fiction for too long. Recently, I watched The Woman in Black, and I could hardly pay attention to the story because the backdrop was beautiful and desolate. When I was writing The Wolf Tree, I wanted to pull in those elements, so the island felt like a character itself. I also find that a harsh environment can justify some of the characters’ insane decisions so that the setting and the supernatural mystery about it go hand in hand.
What inspired the wolf tree and wulver motif?
The wulver story came from my research and has a strong connection to fishing cultures, so that made incorporating it easy. The tree itself came from a sculptor I had seen at the time who carved trees into various images, some of them created like instruments to play the wind. I wanted to use that somehow in the book, so I incorporated it into the wulver folklore. I love that I could use the wulf tree, too, to draw into question George’s version of reality—is what she sees and hears real or imagined, since no one else seems to experience the same?
How does working in film and theater inform your writing in general? This story?
When I write, I see the scenes play out in my mind—usually when I’m out for a run—and then I quickly try to write down (or dictate on my phone) what’s in my head. I think that kind of process gives my stories a certain atmosphere very similar to my favorite cinematic moments. Some of my favorite films include those bleak, dramatic, and spooky landscapes, like The Woman in Black does. They stay with me. When I was writing The Wolf Tree, I saw those landscapes in my mind.
Though this story is about a remote island, their inhabitants’ deep fear of change feels very relevant. Is this island a microcosm of our larger world?
The island culture was born from my curiosity about the responsibilities and obligations that we pass on to the next generation. I’m not sure if I was conscious about this theme as I was writing, but, because I was writing the novel during lockdown (its own kind of remote island), in a turbulent political climate, I noticed how the younger generation tended to push back on policies that reflected a more traditional way of thinking—a clash that becomes the conflict of this story.
I read that you are working on another George Lennox book. Is The Wolf Tree the beginning of a series, or do you have any plans to pursue newer themes and characters?
At the end of The Wolf Tree, readers are left with some unanswered questions about the characters and their journeys. In the new book, we pick back up with George and Richie, and they will continue to evolve. But the new book is not a sequel in the sense that we’re still talking about everything that happened with the wolf tree. Some time has passed, and George and Richie investigate a new case, this time in the remote Highlands. It will be accessible to new readers but with enough hints of their past to entice anyone to go back and read The Wolf Tree. Creating that balance has been a lot of fun.
Laura McCluskey is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and actor. She created the production company Sibylline Films and co-founded Three Fates Theatre Company. The Wolf Tree is her first novel.