Gabrielle Griffiths (2025) Greater Sins

Gabrielle Griffiths’ debut novel Greater Sins is published by Penguin. So what? You might be thinking Well, let me tell you, that’s one of the big four or five publishers. It’s not newsworthy but it is a big deal in the rocky world of publishing. There’s no greater sin than jealousy. So I’ll shut up.

Setting: Cabrach.

I wasn’t sure if this was a real place. It is. Nearest town Huntly. Nearest big city Aberdeen. We’re in classic Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scot’s Quare. Chrissie and the Mearns of Sunset Song territory.

Timeframe.

1915 but with flashbacks to ten years earlier. 1905.

Point of view (whose story is it?)

Johnny (Jack) and Lizzie.

Both are outsiders. Johnny is ensconced in the local inn, where locals gather for a nip and pint. He’s a makar ready with a quip and story and song to entertain them. Dependent on the company of strangers for his livelihood (which I find doubtful) especially in a rocky and remote region. Johnny has been there long enough to have made friends with the local farmers. He’s agreed to help out with best mate Rab, who owns a farm and can no longer get enough hands since the war started and men have begun joining up.

Lizzie’s husband is away to war. Johnny hears her wailing as he drives away. Lizzie allows herself that—the false note for the laird of all kinds of lies. Her sister-in-law Jane, watches over her. For no middle class woman can be allowed to live on her own in a place in the back of beyond, with just a house keeper. It would be unseemly.

Plot

Meet cute is for the movies. Here it’s over a dead body. A woman’s preserved body buried at the edge of a stream. Lizzie finds it. Johnny unearths it and carries it down to be placed his pal’s hayloft.

Who is she? What was she? How did she die?

These are some of the questions Lizzie asks. Because she too is an outcast. It also allows her to invite a former beau into her life—in a professional capacity—who works as a police officer. A what if—that takes her back to a happier time before her marriage in 1905.

Johnny was unsettled to find a loon, Henry, working on Rab’s farm. He knew Johnny as Jack then. A pretty boy and farmhand like him. But unlike him was brought inside the society of Horsemen with masonic-like rituals including shaking hands with the devil.

The unearthing of the woman’s body feeds Henry’s growing unease. He’s with the Reverend and others that demand the body be laid to rest and blest, immediately. There’s something unsettling about its brooding presence. A local enlisted lad, blown up and returned home in pieces, said he had seen her and felt her malevolent presence.

Carbrach’s past has encroached on the present. With social ties loosened by the First World War Johnny and Lizzie’s timeline starcross. Ghost story or love story? No greater sin that being found out. Read on.     

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