The Cleared Island

Some places aren't empty. They were emptied.

Kirsty is the one they come to now. Two years a solicitor and the youngest keeper of a count that began before she was born, she takes her first case alone: Eilean Fàire, a Hebridean island famously and 'voluntarily' abandoned by its last families in 1953 — a poignant end-of-an-era story retold on every heritage board since.

But an old woman born on that island was told, as a child, never to speak of the west end. Because the far side of Eilean Fàire was never a home. It was a station — for people the country brought there precisely because no one visits a cleared island, and no one counts the dead on ground everyone agrees is empty. With her sister Iris beside her, Kirsty must raise a count from bare stone, peat, and a single word — and put the vanished back where a nation's tenderest story erased them.

The Cleared Island is a gripping, atmospheric Scottish crime novel — Book Three of the Iris Calder series, for readers of Tana French, Ann Cleeves, and Jane Harper.