{"id":6023,"date":"2025-06-30T10:33:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T10:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/?p=6023"},"modified":"2025-09-05T10:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:38:13","slug":"laura-mccluskey-the-wolf-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/30\/laura-mccluskey-the-wolf-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura McCluskey: The Wolf Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Remote Scottish islands have long been good settings for isolating people in literature. In Laura McCluskey\u2019s debut, The Wolf Tree<\/em> (2025), the two detectives who come ashore on Eilean Eadar, a fictional Hebridean island, are very much ducks out of water. The islanders, however\u2014rooted to the island for generations\u2014are just as secluded, albeit in a different way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it opens, there\u2019s an echo of The Wicker Man<\/a><\/em> (1973, dir: Robin Hardy) as its two detectives arrive by boat to find seemingly expectant locals. Unlike the film\u2019s search for a missing person, these coppers are tasked with investigating a teenage suicide and assessing whether the cause of death might not be self-inflicted after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox\u2014known as George\u2014is returning to duty after being hospitalised for her gung-ho attitude to crime fighting, though she\u2019s now hiding an addiction to opioids, a subplot that, unless expected to expand into future books, doesn\u2019t really conclude. Acting as chaperone to his high-flying colleague is Richie Stewart, of similar rank but whose career, marked by fewer achievements, is now nearing its end. They are friends, in and out of work, but tensions also underpin their relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wolf Tree<\/em> is a police procedural, with Lennox and Richie working their way through prominent islanders in search of an elusive truth. While there\u2019s an obvious suspicion of \u201cmainland scum\u201d, there\u2019s also the menacing hint that the islanders\u2019 reticence to speak may stem from coercion by unknown forces. Yet Eilean Eadar also harbours a historical mystery\u2014nodding to the geographically similar Flannan Isles, where three lighthouse keepers disappeared in 1900\u2014with Lennox invited to review, in her downtime, the surviving notebooks of this island\u2019s missing keepers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite being packaged like a thriller, McLuskey\u2019s novel is more a slow-burn investigation shining its light into the darker recesses of island life. It nicely veers into light gothic (how could it not in such a setting?) and pleasantly hints at folk horror, with its island too remote even for the Scottish Reformation and so the old ways prevail under the cloak of Catholicism. It\u2019s perhaps trying to do too much, taking in other genres in its central pursuit of the truth, though these genres\u2019 atmospheric touches are greatly appreciated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the book\u2019s biggest problem is its dialogue. It\u2019s functional: people speak and what they say is natural in content\u2014but so little of it feels Scottish. McLuskey, an Australian, hints at \u201cthe lyrical patterns of Gaelic\u201d or rare moments of dialect (\u2018my da\u201d; \u201cwee barra\u201d; \u201cshite\u201d). The characters rarely banter, and this flatness undercuts both the texture and realism of the setting. Perhaps this is a gripe that would only be observed by a native, but in this case it always felt at one remove from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although it doesn\u2019t set the world (or its police) alight, The Wolf Tree<\/em> is a decently plotted mystery that keeps us guessing, helped in part because its mysterious title only becomes evident toward the end. Despite reservations over its Caledonian credentials, McLuskey\u2019s descriptive writing feels assured, although her main characters come across as less interesting than the supporting cast. If this is to be the first in a series of ongoing appearances for Lennox, then they will definitely benefit from deeper immersion in the their setting\u2014and hopefully sharper dialogue will come from it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remote Scottish islands have long been good settings for isolating people in literature. In Laura McCluskey\u2019s debut, The Wolf Tree (2025), the two detectives who come ashore on Eilean Eadar, a fictional Hebridean island, are very much ducks out of water. The islanders, however\u2014rooted to the island for generations\u2014are just as secluded, albeit in a Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[347],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mccluskey-laura"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/the-wolf-tree.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pon-1z9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6025,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023\/revisions\/6025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}