We Search the Island for Grace

The new literary crime novel by Gold Dagger-shortlisted Burke-Patel is an atmospheric homage to Agatha Christie.

They gather at Saints’ Climb, the only house on an island off the Somerset coast. Eight men with nowhere else to be at Christmas. Father and son George and Xavier Starvely; James, a taciturn archaeologist uneasy with the living; Victor, a French widower; Rick, the groundskeeper; and Chris and Nathan, the two men who want to make a documentary about this place and its extraordinary collection of medieval art. And the housekeeper Marianne, who seems to find peace in serving. Erected around the stone labyrinth built into the floor by monks, Saints’ Climb is a house heavy with loneliness. Xavier Starvely is a successful academic with a real life elsewhere. Yet he is wracked with guilt over the fragmentary memories of a childhood tragedy, and when his guests arrive on the island for Christmas, the deaths begin afresh. A labyrinth is different from a maze. There are no false turns or dead ends: there is only one winding path, which, followed faithfully, will always lead to the centre. What will each find at the centre of the labyrinth? And can it save them?