THE AURIGA MADNESS

The Auriga is an ordinary ship, making a perfectly ordinary voyage across the North Sea from Helsinki to the Firth of Forth - until an unfortunate, but nevertheless fairly ordinary, event forces her Chief Steward to rapidly rethink his menus for the rest of the trip ... and everyone's ultimate nightmare secures a foothold aboard that previously so ordinary ship.

Whereupon The Madness is to prove a hideous affliction which can derange men's minds, cause them to hallucinate, turn them against each other, drive them to acts obscene in their conception. But stealthy at first, for the ultimate manifestation of The Madness requires time to spawn, to grow and to subjugate all reason; to destroy the seaman’s instinct which carries countless ships like Auriga safely across the oceans of the world. It won’t reveal its full potential for horror for some hours: not until the ship had already entered the ever-narrowing waters of the Firth of Forth, with that huge waterway’s unsuspecting traffic and its Royal Naval dockyard at Rosyth, and its supertanker terminal off Hound Point.

And the river's vulnerability, particularly that of its two great bridges, to a ship the size of the Auriga. When The Madness takes charge of the watch ...

The most frightening thing about Brian Callison's spine-chilling thriller is that it is based on scientific fact. What happened to 'Auriga' suggests a possible solution to the mystery of the Mary Celeste ... The Madness is real: it does exist. It has continued to strike in many countries, over many centuries, since being first recorded on an Assyrian tablet six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

It could happen again tomorrow. It could happen here. It could happen to you.

'A story ... that has just about everything, logged by Mr Callison with a beautiful sense of timing that will keep his readers chewing their knuckles to the bitter end.'  New York Times.