Showing posts with label Scotland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scotland. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Red Runs the Witch's Thread


Paisley, Scotland, 1697. Thirty-five people accused of witchcraft. Seven condemned to death. Six strangled and burned at the stake. All accused by eleven-year-old Christian Shaw.

Bargarran House, 1722. Christian Shaw returns home, spending every waking hour perfecting the thread bleaching process that will revive her family’s fortune. If only she can make it white enough, perhaps her past sins will be purified too.
But dark forces are at work. As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the witch burnings approaches, ravens circle Bargarran House, their wild cries stirring memories and triggering visions.

As Christian’s mind begins to unravel, her states of delusion threaten the safety of all those who cross her path. In the end she must make a terrible choice: her mind or her soul? Poverty and madness, or a devil’s bargain for the bleaching process that will make her the most successful businesswoman Paisley has ever seen?

Her fate hangs by a thread. Which will she choose?

Thursday, January 18, 2024

War of the Wind


On a remote Scottish island, fourteen-year-old Max’s life changes forever when he loses his hearing in a boating accident. Struggling to make sense of his new life and finding it hard to adapt in school, he begins to notice other — even stranger — changes taking place when a new wind farm appears off the island’s coast.

With the help of three school friends with additional support needs, Max discovers that a sinister scientist, Doctor Ashwood, is using wind turbines to experiment on the islanders. They must find a way to shut down the government’s secret test before it spins out of control…

Saturday, September 16, 2023

The Whistlers in the Dark


Scotland, 158 AD, is a divided country.

On one side of the Antonine Wall, thirteen-year-old Felix is trying to become a good Roman soldier like his father. On the other, twelve-year old Jinny is vowing revenge on the ‘metal men’ who have invaded her Damnonii tribe’s homeland. At the Damnonii’s sacred circle of standing stones, her planned attack on Felix goes badly wrong, awakening a legend that threatens to bring fire and destruction down on them all.

Can Jinny and Felix overcome their differences and soothe the stones back to sleep before it’s too late?

Friday, October 1, 2021

The Chronicles of Iona: Exile

 

“Exile”, the first novel in the historical fiction series “The Chronicles of Iona”, is the story of the two men who laid the foundations of the Scottish nation, an Irish monk, Saint Columba, and a Scottish warlord, Aedan mac Gabran. They were a real-life sixth-century Merlin and King Arthur and their story has never been told.

It is 563 A.D. The world has been plunged into chaos by the collapse of the Roman Empire and barbarian invasions: civilization holds on by a thread. Columba, a powerful abbot and prince of Ireland, is exiled for a violent act to the pagan colony of Dalriada on the west coast of Scotland. Awaiting him there is Aedan mac Gabran, the down-and-out second son of the colony’s previous king, slain by the bloodthirsty Picts.

Together, this unlikely pair travels the breadth of a lawless, divided realm, each in search of his own kind of unity. Their path is fraught with blood feuds, lost love, sacrifice, miracles, dark gods, and monsters. Beset on all sides, their only hope is to become allies—and to forge a daring alliance with the pagan Picts.

How Columba overcame exile and a crisis of faith to found the famous monastery of Iona (one of the greatest centers of learning in Dark Age Europe) and, from it, the Celtic Church in the British Isles; and how Aedan avenged his father’s death and became, against all odds, the progenitor of Scottish kings and the greatest warlord of his age, begins here. 

For both, what begins as a personal imperative becomes a series of events that lead to the foundation of Iona and the kingdom of Scotland—events that literally change the world.

Historically authentic yet told with a bold fictional sweep, “The Chronicles of Iona: Exile” plunges the reader into the world of sixth-century Scotland and Ireland, the veritable Dark Ages—a world on the brink of either collapse or creation, poised between myth and history.

Saturday, June 26, 2021

Mirrorland

Cat lives in Los Angeles, far away from 36 Westeryk Road, the imposing gothic house in Edinburgh where she and her estranged twin sister, El, grew up. As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full of pirates, witches, and clowns. These days Cat rarely thinks about their childhood home, or the fact that El now lives there with her husband Ross.

But when El mysteriously disappears after going out on her sailboat, Cat is forced to return to 36 Westeryk Road, which has scarcely changed in twenty years. The grand old house is still full of shadowy corners, and at every turn Cat finds herself stumbling on long-held secrets and terrifying ghosts from the past. Because someone—El?—has left Cat clues in almost every room: a treasure hunt that leads right back to Mirrorland, where she knows the truth lies crouched and waiting...