The key of the chest - Neil M. Gunn

When a storm in wrecked on a rocky Highland coast in a wild night, Charlie MacIan drags a drowning seaman out of the pounding waves. The seaman is clinging to a wooden chest. Brought into shelter, he is found to be deadbut was his death accidental? And did the chest once contain money? These questions hang like a threat over the various members of a small community struggling to keep life going on a hard, relentless coast. It is a mystery in which Neil Gunn displays his skills as a writer of depth and subtlety and we emerge from the tale asking questions about the nature and meaning of community itself, and how it can survive in a bewildering and violent modernity.