I saw Stig Abell interviewed at the Hay Festival last year about his debut novel Death Under a Little Sky and it sounded just the sort of crime fiction that I enjoy (see my crime fiction blogs) so I took it on holiday with me to Fuerteventura at the end of August.

The protagonist, Jake Jackson, has given up everything about his previous life – his police career, his life in London and his marriage, after him and his wife drifted apart in the wake of multiple miscarriages. His opportunity to start again comes when his uncle Arthur leaves him a house in the woods that is so remote that you can’t even drive up to it, and it doesn’t have a shower or a washing machine. What it does have, however, is an extensive library of detective fiction and a lake for him to grow an enthusiasm for wild swimming, as he grows an ever longer beard.

This quiet life is interrupted when he bumps into Livia in a field of sheep and is delighted to learn that she is single and has a charming daughter, Diana. All good so far, but when he wins the local competition to find a hidden ‘bag of bones’, and finds out that there are real bones inside, things start to get sinister.

It’s at times like these that you think twice about sitting in a sauna that can be locked from the outside, or living somewhere where you can’t call for help and where communication relies on hanging a scarf on a tree to attract someone else’s attention.

Can Jake find out what happened to the women whose bones he found and save himself and his friends before it’s too late? It’s a fantastic 342 pages to find out and I can’t wait to read the next in the series.