A Death Correctly Filed Rona Registers Book

On the Scottish island of Rona, everybody knows everybody — which means everybody knows what not to ask.

When civil registrar Clare Finch receives Malcolm Doig’s death certificate, the cause of death is listed as undetermined. The police are unconcerned. The island is quiet in the particular way it goes quiet when something old has been disturbed.

Clare is not a detective. She records births, marriages and deaths; she files documents; she notices when things do not sit properly. Malcolm Doig’s certificate does not sit properly.

What follows is an investigation conducted in the only language Clare speaks fluently: paperwork. And what the paperwork reveals — a name changed three weeks after a drowning in 1979, a ledger kept outside the official record, a photograph that changes the shape of everything — is a truth the island has been quietly maintaining for forty-five years.

The first book in The Rona Registers series. For readers of Alexander McCall Smith and Ann Cleeves.