September

Calum Lachlan, a 40-year-old bachelor, landowner and hero of World War Two, is driving along a lonely Lakeland road when he is flagged down by a highly distressed young woman who appears to have been the victim of a violent attack. The stranger merely introduces herself as September and will say nothing about how she came to be where she is, where she is going to or from whence she came. It is raining and late on a Sunday evening and, reluctantly, Calum feels it incumbent upon himself to offer the woman food and shelter for the night.

Thus commences a journey which, whilst beginning in good faith and charity, rapidly moves the reader through many of the fraught emotions and behaviours which, sadly, so often define human life – loneliness, decency, love, romance and even adultery. Then, as this darker side of human nature manifests itself, raw evil, and cynical treachery combine to create the dire but often inevitable corollary of such an unholy pairing – brutal, pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder!

Now incarcerated in the dark reaches of the 12th century castle prison at Lancaster, abandoned by the wife who so successfully and comprehensively framed him and in the long, threatening, and sinister shadow of the gallows and the hangman’s noose; Calum waits. Waits with only the company of the spectre of someone from the shadowy reaches of his violent past to comfort him, waits to learn about his own, very uncertain future; or perhaps more accurately, if he is to be allowed to have one.