“I had always known there was something different about me,” Inti says, “but that was the day I first recognized it to be dangerous. It was also the day, as I stumbled out of the shed into a long violet dusk, that I looked to the trees’ edge and saw my first wolf, and it saw me.” 

Inti Flynn arrives from Alaska to the remote village of Cairngorms in Scotland, tasked with reintroducing fourteen wolves to the land that they once inhabited. Her twin sister Aggie, who has become non-verbal since experiencing an unspecified traumatic event in Alaska, accompanies her. Aggie's trauma runs so deep that she is sometimes almost catatonic. An explanation is drip fed to us, and we start to understand why they share this experience. 

Woven among the stories of the present day and Alaska is the story of the twins' childhood, which was split between their detective mother's home in Sydney and their environmentalist father's in Vancouver. Their parents' differences are stark; their father teaches them to love the wild and how to live respectfully in it, while their mother teaches them of the wildness in humans and the horror that it can sometimes cause. 

Inti struggles to convince the people of Cairngorms that the reintroduction of the predators will ultimately benefit them. She is prone to angry outbursts and this does little to endear her to her fellow villagers, bar Duncan, who does his best to get close to her. The villagers feel that they were right to be afraid when one of them is killed and a wolf is thought to be the culprit. But are the wolves really to blame? 

I wasn't expecting the murder-mystery aspect of this book and really enjoyed it. The tension is ramped up at a good pace and we're kept guessing. There is a darkness to this book, which is underscored by the violent acts of the men in the twins lives. The reasons for Inti's anger become apparent and it becomes easier to sympathise with her. I loved the scenes involving the wolves and the descriptions of the Highlands are sublime. This is a beautiful, dark thriller as well as a love letter to conservationists and their tireless efforts to save our home. 

Many thanks to the author, the publisher, Random House UK, Vintage and Net Galley for the advanced digital copy.