Peter May Audiobooks

A Winter Grave, Scottish crime in which the weather does half the work

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

14 listener ratings

Who is Peter May?

Peter May (born 1951) is a Scottish novelist and crime writer who came to fiction by way of television, where he worked as a screenwriter. That apprenticeship matters more than it might sound: television drama teaches structure, pace and the discipline of the hook, and those instincts are precisely what crime readers prize.

The bare facts are quickly told – Scottish, born mid-century, a career spanning screen and page – but the combination places him squarely within the strong modern tradition of Scottish crime writing, where atmosphere and landscape pull as much weight as plot. May learned storytelling as a trade before he practised it as a novelist, and it is exactly that professional’s economy that distinguishes his work.

Peter May in audiobooks

A Winter Grave is the May title in our catalogue, and the title alone announces the register: cold, dark and unmistakably northern, exactly the territory in which he trades. Crime fiction written by former screenwriters tends to make superb listening – scene-built, dialogue-forward and paced for momentum – and May is a case in point. For UK listeners who like their crime with weather, landscape and a chill that is not entirely meteorological, this is a dependable choice: the work of a storyteller who learned his craft twice over, once for the screen and once for the page.