Where the Shadow Falls: An Alice Rice Mystery

By Gillian Galbraith

When the body of a retired sheriff is discovered in his grand house in the New Town of Edinburgh, Detective Sergeant Alice Rice finds herself hunting his killer.
The search leads her to an unfamiliar world where wind-farm developers – with millions of pounds at stake – and protesters face each other with daggers drawn. Just as Alice thinks an answer is beginning to emerge, the sheriff's lover is killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident.
An unlikely coincidence or, as the search widens, is Alice now investigating a double murder?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Polygon
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857900340

Gillian Galbraith

Gillian Galbraith was an advocate specialising in medical negligence and agricultural law cases for seventeen years. She also worked for a time as an agony aunt in teenagers’ magazines. Since then, she has been the legal correspondent for the Scottish Farmer and has written on legal matters for The Times. She is the author of The Alice Rice Mysteries series, and in 2014 she began the Father Vincent Ross Mystery series with The Good Priest.

Reviews for Where the Shadow Falls

[edwardsgt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and topical plot involving protests against a wind farm which leads to murder. There are strong hints about the murderers identity, but some excellent dialogue and humour.I

[dsc73277 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The front of this book includes a claim by the Sunday Express that the Alice Rice series, in which this is the second book, is "the new Rebus". That's a very big claim, and one I'm not sure that even the book's author would welcome, although any extra sales it might generate would presumably be welcome.Yes, this is a crime novel set in Edinburgh but, aside from breaking the rules to get hold of a DNA sample, Alice Rice has not yet developed into the sort of maverick cop or troubled soul represented by Rebus. She seems remarkably ordinary and balanced by comparison with so many fictional detectives, even her love life seems to be sorted by the end of this book. This ordinariness is not necessarily a weakness, it could be argued that the unorthodox loner type has been somewhat overdone in the crime genre. I found it a welcome to change to find a detective who isn't smoking or drinking herself towards an early grave.Another difference from the Rebus books is that we don't get the same insight into the Edinburgh underworld, because (without giving too much away) the crimes depicted here are the actions of self-interested individuals in response to specific situations, rather than the work of career criminals. If as well as "the new Rebus" you are looking for 'the new Cafferty', then you won't find him in this book, although again this is not necessarily a negative in my view since I always liked the Rebus books more for their strong sense of place and for their central character than for his erstwhile opponents.Another key difference is that Alice Rice is starting her career a good decade earlier than Rebus, who was in the army before joining the police. I've heard Ian Rankin say that after the series took off, he regretted the fact that he had first introduced Rebus in middle age, thereby curtailing the amound of books he could get out of him. Perhaps Gillian Galbraith heard this too and has acted accordingly? Whatever her plans for the length of this series, in this second book at least she has created something very readable, even if not exactly ground-breaking. Who says that every novel should seek to break new ground anyway?