Coffin Island (2024) by Kate Ellis

The small island of St Rumon’s, off the coast of South Devon, is better known locally as Coffin Island, due, in part at least, to its shape. It has a sinister history, being the home of the magus Elias Anselmo in the sixteenth century. The life of Anselmo was full of dark deeds and disaster – and it seems that darkness is stretching into the present day.

When a storm exposes three bodies on the island, one of them is far more recent than the others. Everything seems to come back to Quentin Search, an author and conspiracy theorist, who now occupies Anselmo’s house.

As more deaths occur, DI Wesley Peterson and his team have a big problem – how do you find a killer when you don’t know the identity of the victim?

Book 28 in the Wesley Peterson series and don’t be worried if you haven’t read the previous twenty-seven titles – I have – this is, as with all of the books, a perfect place to jump on. Wesley and his team don’t have an ongoing saga of trauma that will spoil any earlier titles, just some ups and downs in their lives that knowing the outcome of won’t make any difference to your reading.

I do like that about this series – Wesley and his team have lives that develop, but no one has huge dark skeletons in their past haunting them. Things change in their lives – it’s not Midsomer Murders* – but the story here is, as ever, about a complex mystery and its parallels to the story from the past.

I always think the unknown body story is hard to do, especially when you’re not trapped in a country house with a closed circle of suspects. The police procedural involves checking out all possibilities but the nature of the detective novel requires that when the detectives go in a wrong direction with regards to the corpse, that direction usually needs somehow to tie into the main story – and we have quite a few possible-but-wrong identities for the corpse herein.

It’s one of the signs of Kate’s skills as a plotter that I became more and more intrigued as to where this was going as the first half of the book went on. There are other authors who would have tested my patience and would have just felt like they were padding the page count before the real investigation would take place, but that’s clearly not the case here. I did catch what was going on (mostly) – there was one sentence that I thought gave it away – but as ever, I was caught out by the sting in the tale that usually shows up in Kate’s work.

I probably didn’t need to write this review – as I said, this is the twenty-eighth book in the series, and I’ve read all twenty-eight. Kate’s writing never lets me down and she won’t let you down either.

Coffin Island is out now from Little Brown/Piatkus in hardback and ebook. Many thanks for the review copy.

* In the past fourteen years, John Barnaby’s become a father and got a new dog. That’s it. And in the past seven years, DS Winter has… um, stood next to Barnaby a lot.

The Wesley Peterson Series: