What Allan McLean has done for Skye, Eilís Dillon is doing for remote Irish seaboards. Here are no crooks in the storybook sense, but people gone wrong. In The Island of Horses it is a local dealer who has turned thief to bolster up his self-importance. In The Singing Cave it is an egotistical recluse who covets the Viking found in the sand. In The House on the Shore it is an old man warped by his wife's death. With the free emotional swing of Irish tales, the motives of these very individual criminals are laid bare to us…. To find crime in everyday life, to find real motives for it, and to fuse detail into an imaginative whole—Eilís Dillon has done this, and has raised the standard of the adventure story in doing it. (pp. 261-62)