What I’m about to relate may disturb, offend, or even repulse you, but it’s what came from one man’s recently manufactured world as the newest member of the Orcadian elite and his conspicuous return to the Islands, having left 25 years earlier.  

 Local lad returned to splash the cash with for local businesses, conservation & wild-life trusts, and a generous patron to local artisans, while managing to keep his wealth an unknown intrigue for locals and visitors to his new art-deco mansion.  

  Within that Mansion, Harry Willingdon was gathering all the people he wanted to slowly destroy, and for a while, all was gonging to plan, but this summer evening, one of those friends and business partner, is found dead. Within this unique gathering of characters, lay simmering motives, revealing a world of cynical – poison-dripping - mind-games, lust, envy, emotional-manipulation and a desire to kill.  

 Laid bare to the reader are the beautifully ugly bedrock of our wants and desires that protrude the characters assembled and their unholy alliance with others they hate. What drives each of them is revealed, against a uniquely Orcadian landscape and relationship-dynamics, metal-health, and the struggle with desire that awaits the opportunity to act.

 Harry demands the case is not dealt with locally, so Detective Inspector Rendall is called upon from the mainland. He has a connection with Orkney, knows more than he seems, and uses his uniquely disarming manor and quick-thinking to reveal the worst of human kind.  

 The humour is dry, allowing intrigue to develop in the auspicious setting, with deep, dynamic characters of the everyday heroic, and a mystery that reveals an unexpected twist to entertained, if not concern.