This is not the sort of book I would tend to read, but it was our book club pick so I went ahead. And let me tell you, there was a degree of whiplash because I had just finished EJ Swift’s When There are Wolves Again, which has some similar ideas – rewilding, wolves should be back in Britain – but is also completely different.

Content warning: animal deaths, and violence towards women.

Once isn’t linear; we get a lot of flashbacks to points in Inti’s life, explaining how she and her twin have ended up in the Cairngorms. It’s clear that there’s been a significant trauma for the sister, Aggie, but it’s unclear just how far in the past that is – until it’s not, and then it’s sadly predictable.

So there’s the unravelling of what happened to Aggie, and there’s the reintroduction of wolves to Scotland and in particular around a farming community that is deeply divided as to whether the wolves are a good idea. And then there’s the death of a man who has clearly been violent towards his wife, and with whom Inti has been clashing. Figuring out who or what killed him runs parallel with Aggie and Inti’s story.

The book is well enough written; I skimmed a few sections, I admit, because I got a bit impatient with some of the angsting. I didn’t exercise myself to try and figure out what was going on, but let myself be carried along by the narrative, partly because I was feeling lazy and partly because the story didn’t really incite much enthusiasm for doing so – I knew it would all be tied up neatly.

It’s fine. If you’re up for a standalone mystery set in Scotland with a few different threads, this may well be for you.