Standalone
Not From Here
A Hebridean Crime Novel
Release: Coming 24 Nov
Everyone gets a welcome. Not everyone gets to stay.
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On an island where everyone knows everyone, nobody asks why the incomers keep leaving.
February on North Uist. PC Ishbel MacAskill is three months into her posting at Lochmaddy, boxing up the old police station, when the call comes in: a car in a flooded peat cutting on the Committee Road. The driver is Martin Ashby, a retired engineer who moved to the islands from Cheshire. The answer comes easily. A dark road, a drink, a bog pool.
But Martin's dog was shut in at home, and his son swears he hadn't touched a drop in years. And in a cabinet set aside for Inverness, Ishbel finds a file from 2003: another incomer, the same pool, the same easy answer.
On Berneray, where her father's family come from, they call her Tormod MacAskill's girl. The welcome is warm. But rooms go quiet when the wrong person walks in, talk slips into Gaelic, and the people who don't fit have a way of leaving.
Ishbel has to decide whose island this is, and whether she is from here at all.
A standalone Hebridean crime novel.
Opening extract
The old police station at Lochmaddy had been sold in principle and not yet in fact, and so it sat at the top of the brae in a kind of probation, neither theirs nor anyone else's. The heating was off. The cells had been emptied of their blue mattresses in November. In the front office, where the counter had not opened to the public in years, there was a rectangle of paler paint where the map of the Uists had hung, and a drawing pin still holding the corner of it, torn.
Ishbel MacAskill had been sent up with the van and the keys and PC Lewis Dunbar, to finish what the move in October had not.