The Flood (Fiona MacLeish #1)

The Flood is not what I would call a crime thriller, it was more of a locked room, a whodunnit mystery.
Set in a valley in the Scottish borders we meet Fiona MacLeish, the main character. She is on leave from being a police constable and decides to go to her Aunt Mary’s home the place she grew up.
Fiona tells the reader frequently how she wanted to be a detective so she can find out who murdered her parents. But she can’t do exams due to the trauma of being told her parents were dead when she was in an exam at school.

An epic storm is about to hit, and as the water is rising it starts to flood, Fiona decides to check on an elderly neighbour and finds him dead, with no sign of his wife either.

Trying to get out of the valley proves hard and she realises that they are trapped until the storm stops and the water levels start to drop. The safest place to go is the farmhouse which is a little higher than the other homes beginning to flood.

A group of people are already at the farmhouse, and they are all trapped together. It isn’t long before people start getting annoyed with being trapped arguments happen and then more people are murdered. Who is the murderer?
This is quite slow going throughout, it is very descriptive both inside the farmhouse and outside too which I would expect as it lays out just how flooded and trapped everyone is from the outside world. I did like Fiona, she is a great main character, not afraid to get her hands dirty and tell people a few home truths if needed and her Aunt Mary has a special place in my heart!

I switched to audio a third of the way through and I found that much better, the accents were fantastic, and I think it made the book so much better, a real feel of Scottish people.

Overall it was a good book, not as gripping as it could have been, but enough in there to keep you guessing throughout.