The Wayless Road · Book 1
The Stone on the Shelf Path
Out now
If it answers you, it isn’t them.
Twenty-one months ago, Mairi Munro walked onto the hill above Glen Corrach in the January snow. The searchers found nothing. Her husband Calum, head stalker on the estate for thirty years, has walked the corries every day since.
Then a stone appears on the shelf path that wasn't there yesterday.
It marks a road on no map, one that only the grieving can see. It runs out of the glen towards a place where, people say, you can bargain for what you've lost. Calum is certain Mairi went that way.
But the road takes a price for every mile, and the things that walk it wear the faces of the dead. With Ines Halloran, a nurse grieving a son of her own, and Rab, a Glasgow lad far too young to be out here, Calum sets off into a Highlands emptied of the living, where something waits in the loch and only one rule matters: if it answers you, it isn't them.
The Stone on the Shelf Path is the first book of The Wayless Road, a mystery with a folk-horror edge about grief and the long road south.
Opening extract
The guest cancelled at ten to six, which was about right for a man from Surrey who had paid for three days on the hill and been told on the phone, twice, that it would rain.
Calum Munro read the text standing in the larder doorway with the strip light buzzing over his head and the rain coming down past the gutter in a single grey rope. So sorry, flight issues, will rebook in spring. There were no flights that came anywhere near Corrach that the man could have been on. Calum put the phone back in his chest pocket and stood a while longer, looking at the hooks.