The Blood Strand

Book excerpt: The gritty first installment in a crime thriller series set in the Faroe Islands—for fans of Henning Mankell and Ann Cleeves “ . . . a winner for fans of both Scandinavian and British procedurals . . . brilliantly plunges intuitive, straightforward detectives Jan and Hjalti into a complicated tangle of secret motivations . . . ” —Booklist Having left the Faroes as a child, Jan Reyna is now a British police detective, and the islands are foreign to him. But he is drawn back when his estranged father is found unconscious with a shotgun by his side and someone else’s blood at the scene. Then a man’s body is washed up on an isolated beach. Is Reyna’s father responsible? Looking for answers, Reyna falls in with local detective Hjalti Hentze. But as the stakes get higher and Reyna learns more about his family and the truth behind his mother’s flight from the Faroes, he must decide whether to stay, or to forsake the strange, windswept islands for good.