One is One relates the story of Tania’s search for her past, set off by the precipitant death of her caretaker grandparents and subsequent discovery of clues concerning the disappearance or murder of her parents on a remote Orkney island. Tania travels there and enlists the aid of a local private detective who appears to be little more than a comic-book reading man-child. Tania, with her African heritage, stands out among the in-bred pale Nordic locals. Meanwhile, a London Metro Police detective follows up on a disappearance case of his own, the only lead is a photo of a flower which doesn’t exist in the normal world. Thomas, a man disconnected from both time and space, is drawn towards something he knows not what; and watched by those whose thought takes no regard of man. Andrew James Greig orchestrates the convergence of all human and supernatural threads to the Scottish island of Rum for a final act.
I very much enjoyed the interleaving of plot lines in Andrew James Greig’s “One is One”. The incorporation of mythological elements into real-life settings gave the entire story an unearthly ambience, almost like the signature fogs and condensate wet cobblestones described within. The book is tightly edited and formatted beautifully with art accents and maps. Characters are well developed and left me wanting to know much more about the hidden drivers behind the plot. Many are the books which invoke the thin places between universes sprinkled around our fair Earth, but very few live up to their promise as well as this one.