Alan Stewart, a former wildlife crime officer in Tayside Police, has written widely about wildlife crime, in fiction and non-fiction. I have enjoyed his previous books and reviewed four of them here (2017, Killing by Proxy; 2021, Calls from the Wild; 2023, Cruel Intentions; 2024, The Peregrine Thief). This book is also about wildlife crime but also about the murder, by a former gamekeeper, David Campbell, of a former colleague on a highland shooting estate. Alan is joined by Lyndsey Hamilton who is a journalist who has worked for various Scottish papers and is now Chief Reporter of the The Courier.
This book describes the investigation of the death of a man near Aberfeldy in February 2024 and the eventual conviction of his killer in February this year. That is fascinating enough but the authors do much more as the book traces the litany of wildlife deaths and human threats that formed a 40-year prelude to this murder.
It is a gripping book and I read it yesterday from cover to cover. It’s a real page-turner and will certainly be in my list of books of 2026.
I come to this book knowing some of the history, some of the people and much of the background as it involves shooting estates, illegal poisons, dead raptors, gamekeepers, police, lawyers and court procedures. The trial and its outcome were widely reported but here you can get a much clearer picture of how a real murder is investigated (with mistakes along the way) and how the evidence is pieced together and then brought out in court.
It’s difficult to gain a conviction for the killing of a person unless there is an eyewitness, but throughout this book there was lots of evidence accumulating that a particular estate was a scorching hot-spot for wildlife crime. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that a track record of callous behaviour towards animals also predisposes a person to take a callous attitude to human suffering. And reading the very detailed account of events in this corner of Perthshire it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the legal barriers to conviction for a wildlife crime, which may be entirely justified on grounds of fairness, led to an individual perhaps believing that he was either above the law or if not above, then immune from its sanctions.
There is not a page in this book where I felt any sympathy for David Campbell. He seems a thoroughly unpleasant man and was widely suspected within the local community of being responsible for the murder of his former colleague. His motives seem to amount to dislike of his victim and the belief that he had been wronged years ago but to the outsider reading this account, even if true, those events don’t amount to an understandable reason for this killing.
This is a book that should be widely read and I’m sure it will be in the locality where these events occurred. But those who are involved in Pheasant shooting elsewhere should read it too, and pause a little before simply saying that David Campbell was one bad apple. Those involved in combatting wildlife crime will thank the authors for the detail of this case study but should avoid giving the impression that they think that every gamekeeper is made from the same mould as David Campbell. I wonder whether David Campbell, now serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 19 years in prison, which will take him into his nineties, will be a reader too.
The cover? I like its gloominess. I’ll give it 7/10.
Prelude to Murder: revenge killing on a Highland sporting estate by Alan Stewart and Lyndsey Hamilton is published by Thirsty Books.