Alexander Seaton
4 total works
Book 2
It is 1628, and Alexander Seaton's happily settled life as a university teacher in Aberdeen is shattered by the arrival in town of a stranger who looks like his twin and who carries a plea for help from Alexander's dead mother's family in Ireland. The family has been placed under a poet's curse, threatening death to various members. Elements of the curse have already begun to play out. Reluctantly answering the call, Alexander leaves his home and his beloved Sarah and travels to Ulster, to find himself among a family torn apart by secrets and long-buried resentments. In the course of seeking out the author of the curse, Alexander becomes deeply entangled in a conflict that involves fugitive priests, displaced poets, rebellious plotters and agents of the king. Confronted by murder within his family, he finds the lines between superstition and faith, duty and loyalty are becoming increasingly blurred, while his Scottish homeland grows ever more remote.
It is Midsummer, 1631. While Alexander Seaton and his fellow masters enjoy the holiday with their students, Robert Sim, librarian of Marischal College, is murdered in a dark alleyway in town. While the university and town authorities investigate the murder, Seaton is asked by the college principal to look into Sim's private life. In the course of an investigation in which his personal feelings threaten to cloud his judgement and endanger his young marriage to Sarah, he discovers a side to the librarian he could never have guessed at. It is only when a second, apparently unrelated murder comes to light that Seaton begins to piece together the connections between a young weaver, a consignment of books, and events in a college in the Low Countries in order to unmask the perpetrator of the years'-old deception that led to the two deaths.
Banff, Scotland in the 1620s. A young man walks unsteadily through the streets. Is he just drunk or is there something more sinister happening? When he collapses in front of two sisters on that dark, wet night, the women guess that he's been poisoned. His body is discovered in the house of Alexander Seaton - a fallen minister, the discovery of whose clandestine love affair has left him disgraced. Why was the body in Seaton's house? And why would anyone want to murder this likeable young man? Seaton sets out to find answers, embarking on a journey not only through the darkest part of other men's souls, but also his own.
1635, Aberdeen. A girl lies dead in a frozen garden. A young man goes missing after a drunken brawl. A sinister cloaked figure watches from the shadows. The missing student, son of a Highland chief, is in Alexander Seaton's class. When the young man's companion turns up bruised and bloodied, suspicion mounts that he has murdered his friend. But Alexander is convinced that there's another explanation. Drawn ever deeper into the mystery, Alexander realises that the man in the shadows is known to him and that the strange events in the town are linked to his own past.