The Secret Portrait

First print-published by Five Star/Gale in 2006

Deep water . . .

Jean Fairbairn is off to write a story about the haunted waters of Loch Ness. She has an appointment with American scientist Roger Dempsey, who is using his latest gadgets to try and prove that the legend of the monster, Nessie, is true.

Jean’s business is checking out legends. Some hold water, some don’t, and some are about much more than H2O.

But the troubled water she finds at Loch Ness is colder than its snow-melt and darker than its peat-stained depths. Sonar and other remote-sensing tools might find Nessie, but what scientific instrument can plumb the mysteries of death?

Troubled, too, are the waters that run between Jean and Detective Inspector Alasdair Cameron. Will another encounter bridge the depths that lie between them? Or will their story end at the hands of a murderer, in the icy water of a loch that never gives up its dead?

First print-published by Five Star/Gale in 2007.

Fire in the Borders

The rolling hills of the Scottish Borders have seen centuries of fire—Scots, English, battling kings, feuding lords, rampaging clansmen, raiding, looting, killing. But the fire at brooding Ferniebank Castle wasn’t set by an enemy. Isabel Sinclair died there four hundred years ago, on her way to a lover’s tryst, in the conflagration kindled by her own burning-glass.

Or so the story goes.

Now Jean Fairbairn is on her way to write Ferniebank’s story—and to her own tryst with ex-cop Alasdair Cameron, who is now a caretaker of historic properties. He has at last lowered his personal drawbridge for Jean, and they plan to set decaying Ferniebank alight.

But they’re not alone. Ciara Macquarrie, a New Age mythobabbler from Alasdair’s past, plans to transform the castle and its chapel into a bright new conference center and spa. Especially since the chapel was built by the same long-dead hands as cryptic Rosslyn—now a hot tourist attraction, thanks to a popular story titled The Da Vinci Code.

In Scotland, plans go up in smoke. Stories shift and change like reflections in antique glass. Buried secrets rise to haunt the living. The Ferniebank clarsach, Isabel’s harp, disappears—even while its music lingers on. Vandals lurk in the night. Death visits both the castle dungeon and chapel’s ancient well.

To his frustration, Alasdair now has to work in the shadow of the official force. But when the darkness clears, it’s Jean who finds herself facing a murderer.

The Burning Glass is a story of mystery and suspense tightly woven with Jean and Alasdair’s personal story. It takes place in Scotland, on the ever-shifting shore between history and myth, a place where (mis)perception kindles many a fire.

First print-published by Five Star/Gale in 2009

Beneath the hanging tree…

Witches weren’t burned in colonial Virginia. They were hanged. But in the twenty-first century no one should be hanged from the trees of historic Williamsburg. Not even batty conspiracy theorists, however much Jean Fairbairn’s significant other, ex-Scottish cop Alasdair Cameron, might sometimes wish he could pass judgement. Especially when said dingbats may be involved in the theft of a Williamsburg-crafted replica of a sixteenth-century Witch Box, stolen from a Scottish castle for which Alasdair has been supervising security—even though the original Witch Box is safe in a Williamsburg museum.

The Charm Stone went missing from the original Witch Box three hundred years ago. Perhaps it

was not a traditional healing stone at all but a cursing stone. Perhaps it was lost somewhere in

the colony of Virginia. Perhaps someone will kill to find it.

Can Jean maintain her resolve to abandon the academic battlefield forever, or will she be

tempted back into combat by an appealing former colleague, Matthew Frost? And what about

Alasdair, who is supposedly retired from the rigors of law enforcement, but who is now

confronted not only by a theft but two murder cases—and by Stephanie Venegas, the detective in

charge.

Amid the falling leaves and autumn shadows, Jean and Alasdair must deal again with murder most grotesque, its roots deep in history and myth. With ghosts only they can see. With things going bump in the night of their own relationship.

It’s All Hallows Eve in historic Williamsburg, Virginia

The lights went out...

A mortsafe is an iron cage locked over a grave to deter body snatchers. They haven’t been seen in Scottish kirkyards for almost two centuries. So why is a mortsafe lying next to a pair of decayed bodies in one of Edinburgh’s infamous underground vaults?

Newlyweds Jean Fairbairn and Alasdair Cameron are called out on the cold case, in the coldest part of the year, brightened only by the red paper hearts of Valentine’s Day in the shop windows.

It's when living, beating hearts are stopped too soon that memories can become cages stronger than iron.

No deaths are ever entirely forgotten, not when businessmen from ghost hunters to restaurateurs can profit from them. Not when earning a living can sometimes become secondary to simply staying alive.

It's February in the ancient city of Edinburgh, where footsteps echo in secret passages, and lovers don't always have the time to make memories together.

The Mortsafe is a complete novel, half the length of the first five in the series.

First print-published by Wildside Press in 2000

Claire came to the English village to find her best friend, Melinda, who’d vanished after

performing in a play which re-creates a seventeenth-century witchcraft trial.

What she found was a murder mystery—and a man. A man who, like her, is trapped between memory and desire.

The play takes place at the manor house where the protagonists lived and died, a house where

the past is still a haunting presence. Did Melinda ask too many questions about the village’s tragic history? To find her, Claire, too, must ask questions. What she learns is that everyone in the village is playing a role—not just in the melodrama, but in real life.

Claire must walk a fine line between repeating the past and surviving the present. For if she puts one foot wrong, she won’t be seeing the future at all, let alone spending it with the man she’s not only come to trust but to love.

First print-published by Berkley Publishing Group, 1991

The sequel to Ashes to Ashes

After months of long-distance phone calls, Rebecca Reid is thrilled to be working with Michael Campbell again, this time on a dig at Rudesburn Priory in the Scottish Borders. It’s rumored that Robert the Bruce's heart was buried there, and that the abbey's last prioress, Anne Douglas, still haunts its ruins.

Michael and Rebecca have to work with a self-important archaeologist, Jeremy Kleinfelter, whose reputation is on the line after he was accused of salting his previous dig. They also have to deal with the townspeople, who want the dig to be successful---and who don't know about Jeremy's shady past---and four volunteers working on the dig, loose cannons, every one, each with a secret in his or her past.

Then Sheila Fitzgerald, Michael's ex-girlfriend, appears, intent on filming a documentary about the dig.

Uncovering a medieval murder mystery makes the tense situation at the dig even tenser. It's the very fresh body in a very old grave that blows it wide open---and tests their relationship for once and for all. For despite ghosts, music, and mayhem, the dig must go on.

(First print-published by Wildside Press 2001)

Amanda Witham sees her new job at an eighteenth-century house as a career move, just part of the history business, nothing personal. Then archaeologists find a man's skeleton buried in the garden behind the house. That night James Grant's ghost introduces himself to her. And a handsome and charming ghost he is, in the tartan kilt and scarlet coat of King George's Highland Regiment. Suddenly Amanda finds history to be up close and very personal indeed.

She promises James she'll reveal the truth about his death--just as soon as she figures out what the truth is. Why was he buried in the garden when eighteenth-century records say he died in battle?

Amanda's quest begins in Colonial Williamsburg and ends at James's ancestral castle in Scotland. Nothing, not time and space, not illusion and reality, not love and death, turns out to be what she anticipated. And when James's past finally catches up with her present, Amanda finds her future held at sword's point. There's more than one glint of scarlet in the shadows of the past--and in the shadows of the heart as well.

First print-published by Five Star/Cengage in 2010.

In a stately home, no one can hear you scream . . .

Alasdair Cameron and Fergus MacDonald were childhood friends. Their fathers’ caps carried a blue hackle, the badge-feather of a distinguished Scottish regiment. Now the feather in Fergie’s cap is the decaying Dunasheen Estate on the Isle of Skye. His desperate schemes to save his home depend on a collection of historic artifacts, a handful of paying guests expecting a traditional Scottish New Year celebration, and the help of Alasdair and Jean Fairbairn.

For Jean and Alasdair, the bells of the new year are also wedding bells—their rings are ready, their guests are invited, and the Gothic folly of Fergie’s chapel is waiting. Then a guest is found murdered, lying in blood that’s thicker than the sea that carried generations of Scots to distant shores even as their descendants’ hearts turn homeward.

The police crash the party, and Alasdair and Jean find themselves juggling knowledge, belief, and a list of suspects whose secret agendas raise more than a few hackles.

Is that the icy winter wind, or the banshee-wail of a long-dead MacDonald chatelaine affirming that only Fergie’s motives are true-blue? Or is he hiding a secret agenda beneath his fool’s cap and bells?

Ring out the old, ring in the new. But if Alasdair and Jean can't untangle the threads of the past and net a present-day killer, then they and their wedding rings won't get to the church on time—and more blood will flow for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.

(First print-published by Berkley Publishing Group in 1990)

Historian Rebecca Reid comes from Missouri to a replica of a Scottish castle located outside the small town of Putnam, Ohio, to catalog a collection of historical artifacts. She knows that James Forbes, the castle's owner who had just been found dead at the foot of a stairway, owned the Erskine letter—-a letter which might prove that Mary, Queen of Scots' son died at birth and was secretly replaced by another woman's. It’s just what Rebecca needs for her Ph.D. dissertation.

The castle was originally built by James’s parents, John Forbes, captain of industry and collector of all things Scottish, including a young Scottish wife, Elspeth—-who threw herself from the fifth story window when she lost her infant daughter.

At Dun Iain Rebecca finds herself saddled with a co-worker, Michael Campbell, a Scottish professor sent from the Museum of Scotland to separate out the Forbes' family treasures and decide what would go to home to Scotland and what would stay with the historical society. He has a tartan chip on his shoulder and, Rebecca suspects, a hidden agenda. Sparks fly.

Sparks of a different kind fly between Rebecca and Eric Adler, the charming, handsome executor of the Forbes estate. Then there’s Dorothy, the eavesdropping busybody of a housekeeper who had been cleaning Dun Iain for thirty years or more, and handyman Phil Pruitt, his son Steve, and Steve’s girlfriend Heather, all of whom always seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And there’s a castle cat that Michael and Rebecca find personable but that Eric fears.

Ghostly presences stalk the halls, throw dishes in the kitchen, turn lights on and off, and move objects around. When valuables start vanishing and accidents start happening, Rebecca suspects more than just ghosts are at work. Someone wants her and Michael out of Dun Iain.

And amid all the precious artifacts, she can’t find the Erskine letter.

First print-published by Wildside Press in 2002

Matilda Gray is an expert on antiquities, especially the Roman and Celtic artifacts found in Great Britain. But one thing Matilda has learned is that such relics of time past are not valued only by museums but also by unscrupulous collectors, and the illegal trade in such treasures can be deadly.

Gareth March is a Scotland Yard detective who must work—reluctantly—with Matilda to solve the

murder of a woman who knew too much about stolen antiquities. Solving the murder will earn him a promotion. And more—perhaps a greater treasure than Celtic gold is a relationship appearing when he least expects it.

The murder case, the case of the stolen antiquities, and the treasure coming to light at the excavation of a Roman fort are tied inextricably together. At last Matilda and Gareth have to stop arguing and begin a race against time to prevent another murder. They do, after all, agree on one thing: The risk of death makes life and love all the sweeter. There's always time enough to die.