Arachnid Press, 91 Columbia Avenue, Livingston (2025)

26/04/2025

A city at peace in a world at war. ‘The Stockholm Run’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland and Sweden during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

This modern photograph shows the building in Stockholm that served as the headquarters of the Swedish Security Service during the war. It has a background role in the strands of the story set in Sweden.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-tsr/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-tsr/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s March 1943. The death of an intruder reveals a hidden military bunker at Dundas Castle near Edinburgh, a living relic of an anti-invasion scheme from earlier in the war. Bob Sutherland and the Military Intelligence 11 team follow a trail that leads to a much larger secret, buried beneath Edinburgh Castle.

As the mystery in Edinburgh unravels, Bob Sutherland and Monique Dubois are sent to Stockholm, a city supposedly at peace in a world at war. There they are to take delivery of a message of critical national importance.

Or is it all a carefully crafted trap? Both encounter ghosts from the past in Sweden. Can their relationship survive what they uncover? Will they live long enough for that to matter?

25/04/2025

When the past comes back to haunt you. ‘The Danger of Life’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

The Rolls-Royce ‘shadow factory’ at Hillington, west of Glasgow, has a central role in one strand of the story. It was established just before the war to produce Merlin aircraft engines. Parts of it remain standing and its scale is astounding, though much of it has been cleared or modified since the war.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-dol/index.html

It’s October 1942. Group Captain Robert Sutherland’s first week in charge of Military Intelligence 11's operations in Scotland and northern England is not going smoothly. His efforts to find out who is behind an attempt to steal an advanced reconnaissance aircraft from a military airfield in Fife have not been helped by the death of the would-be thief.

An unwanted complication comes via a telephone call from Monique Dubois in MI5 in London. An operation she’s been running in Glasgow has gone badly wrong and she wants him to intervene before it’s entirely compromised.

Worse still, an investigation into a murder at the Commando Basic Training Centre in the Highlands takes a grim turn and Bob is drawn in personally. In Lochaber, the present war intersects with another conflict that took place two centuries earlier: with deadly consequences.

24/04/2025

How far would you go to right a wrong? ‘The House With 46 Chimneys’ is a spooky adventure story for younger readers involving a two-century-old family mystery and the haunting of Dunmore Park, a ruined house in central Scotland.

The substantial remains of Torwood Castle stand about two miles north-east of the town of Denny. The castle is visited by the book’s young characters as they get to know the area around their new home.

Available in paperback, Kindle, Kobo or Apple. Find out more on our website: https://www.arachnid.scot/book-h46c/index.html

Life changes dramatically for Kaleb, Jude and Sequoia when they move to live with their aunt in a rural corner of central Scotland. But then life is changing dramatically for everyone. It’s the beginning of April 2020, the early days of the coronavirus lockdown. The roads are nearly empty of cars and the blue skies almost clear of aeroplanes.

Three local children they meet – in a socially distanced way – draw them into a two-century-old family mystery involving the haunting of the nearby ruins of Dunmore Park, 'The House With 46 Chimneys'. As the book builds to its climax, the children are faced with a decision. Do they try to right a wrong that was done in 1828, a wrong that has had consequences ever since? Or is doing so simply too dangerous?

23/04/2025

One broch, two millennia, three murders. Ken Lussey’s latest novel ‘Thicker Than Water’ is a compelling murder mystery set in northern Scotland.

The fictional Sarclet Broch on the east coast of Caithness south of Wick is the hub around which much of the story revolves and it is where all three of the murders in the book take place. It is closely based on the Broch of Gurness in Orkney, shown in this image.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-ttw/index.html

Callum Anderson and Jenny Mackay are spending Hogmanay at Sarclet Castle in Caithness when they are asked to investigate the brutal murder of a young woman at nearby Sarclet Broch in 1943, a woman whose ghost is believed to haunt the castle.

What seems the coldest of cold cases is not the first murder of a young woman at the broch: there was another nearly two thousand years earlier. Nor is it the last. On the day that Callum and Jenny arrive, there is a third fatal stabbing there.

Their investigation into the 1943 murder uncovers shoddy police work and the possibility of a serial killer: but can anything be proved after eight decades? Meanwhile they find themselves drawn into the increasingly dangerous hunt for the latest murderer.

22/04/2025

How many deaths to end a war? ‘Eyes Turned Skywards’ is a fast-paced thriller set mainly in northern Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

Dunollie Castle perches on the summit of a 90ft high outcrop of rock that guards the narrow passage into Oban Bay between the mainland and the north end of the island of Kerrera. The book begins with a brutal murder at the castle.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-ets/index.html

Wing Commander Robert Sutherland has left his days as a pre-war detective far behind him. Or so he thinks. On the 25th of August 1942 the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, is killed in northern Scotland in an unexplained air crash and a second crash soon after suggests a shared, possibly sinister, cause.

Bob Sutherland is tasked with visiting the aircraft’s base in Oban and the first crash site in Caithness to try to uncover who might have sabotaged one, or both, of the aircraft.

Set against the background of a country that is far from united behind Winston Churchill and the ever-present threat from the enemy, we follow Bob as he unravels layers of deceit and intrigue far beyond anything he could have imagined.

21/04/2025

When the hunter becomes the prey. ‘The High Road’ is a fast-paced contemporary thriller set mainly in central Scotland and the far north-west.

At the beginning of the story the central character is staying at Houstoun House Hotel in West Lothian. At the heart of the hotel is this magnificent tower house dating back to 1598.

Available as a Kindle, Kobo, Apple or audiobook. Find out more:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-thr/index.html

Callum Anderson is in Scotland to scatter his father’s ashes when he’s asked by a cousin to look for her missing sister, Alexandra. With his life in London in tatters and suspended from duty by the Metropolitan Police, why not?

It soon becomes clear that Alex is on the run from a local criminal. But someone much more dangerous is after her too and sees Callum as a means of finding her and adding to a trail of bodies that extends across two countries.

After a brief entanglement with a Police Scotland anti-terrorist operation, Callum drops off the radar to follow the only lead he has left, which takes him to the far north-west of Scotland. But can he find Alex before his own hunter finds him?

20/04/2025

The siege is over but the war goes on. ‘The Eye of Horus’ is an atmospheric World War Two thriller with settings that move from the Highlands of Scotland via Gibraltar to Malta.

The mountains of the Isle of Skye form a backdrop to the start of the story and this modern image shows them partly shrouded in haze when seen from the neighbouring island of Raasay.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-eoh/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-eoh/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s June 1943. Bob and Monique Sutherland are on honeymoon in Kyle of Lochalsh when an unexpected visitor arrives to spoil their idyll.

They agree to travel to Malta to search for two missing men, a young naval lieutenant and an MI6 officer who has disappeared while looking for him. The aerial siege of the island is over and the tide of war has turned but, after three years of bombing, Malta remains a shattered place.

The available leads produce more questions than answers and progress is impeded by lies. As Bob and Monique come closer to discovering what became of the two men, events take a dangerous turn and their priority shifts from enjoying their honeymoon to surviving it.

19/04/2025

A game of secrets and lies. ‘Bloody Orkney’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland, mainly in Orkney, during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

Scapa Bay in Orkney was a very much busier place in 1942 than it is today and has an important part to play in the book, as does Scapa Distillery, which can be seen on the far side of the bay in this modern photograph.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-blork/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-blork/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s November 1942. Bob Sutherland, Monique Dubois and the Military Intelligence 11 team fly in to review security in Orkney, home to one of the most important and most heavily defended naval anchorages in the world.

But an unidentified body has been found. It becomes clear that powerful men have things they’d rather keep hidden and MI11’s arrival threatens the status quo. Then Bob stumbles over a ghost from his past and things get far too personal.

He and Monique are called away to resolve a crisis at a secret experimental base at Gruinard Bay in Wester Ross. When they return to Orkney, they find that the rules have been rewritten and they are in very real danger.

18/04/2025

Relentless pursuit and a grisly murder. ‘Hide and Seek’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Stirling Castle and more widely across Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

This modern image shows the site of a grisly murder in 1943. Its investigation forms a central strand of the story and uncovers links to the murder of an earl by a king that took place here nearly five centuries earlier.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-has/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-has/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

Relentless pursuit and a grisly murder. It’s April 1943. Medical student Helen Erickson is followed from London to her aunt’s farm in Perthshire. What do her pursuers want?

Meanwhile Monique Dubois is attending a secret meeting at Stirling Castle when an old adversary is murdered in a chilling echo of a dark episode in the castle’s history. Bob Sutherland and the MI11 team are called in and discover that almost everyone who knew the victim had a motive.

Helen disappears and it becomes clear that national security is at stake. Monique sets out to find the missing woman before anyone else does, even if it means killing to protect her. Can Monique find Helen? Can Bob track down the killer at Stirling Castle? And just how dangerous have things become for both of them?

17/04/2025

You can’t ask a dead man who pulled the trigger. ‘A Tangled Web’ is a fast-paced contemporary thriller set in northern Scotland.

This is the remote Croick Church in Sutherland, which has reminders of the tragic story that brought word of the Highland Clearances to a much wider audience via an article in The Times on 2 June 1845; and which offers an intriguing mystery. The two central characters visit the church for a clandestine meeting with an informant, though after many of the trees seen in this photo were cut down.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-atw/index.html

Callum Anderson returns to north-west Sutherland to help local GP Jenny Mackay investigate the death of her husband. The authorities say he committed su***de but she’s convinced he was murdered.

As an accountant and a councillor, Iain Mackay was an upstanding pillar of society. Or was he? Callum soon discovers that Iain lied to everyone who thought he loved them: especially his wife and his daughters. He was also a philanderer, a blackmailer and thoroughly corrupt. The possible motives for both murder and su***de begin to mount.

What Callum discovers puts his fledgling relationship with Jenny under real strain. But that becomes the least of their problems when they come up against people who have already killed and would have no qualms about killing again.

16/04/2025

A city at peace in a world at war. ‘The Stockholm Run’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland and Sweden during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

RAF Grangemouth, once the Central Scotland Airport but now long gone, is amongst the Scottish locations used. This modern photograph shows the replica Spitfire at the RAF Grangemouth memorial.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-tsr/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-tsr/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s March 1943. The death of an intruder reveals a hidden military bunker at Dundas Castle near Edinburgh, a living relic of an anti-invasion scheme from earlier in the war. Bob Sutherland and the Military Intelligence 11 team follow a trail that leads to a much larger secret, buried beneath Edinburgh Castle.

As the mystery in Edinburgh unravels, Bob Sutherland and Monique Dubois are sent to Stockholm, a city supposedly at peace in a world at war. There they are to take delivery of a message of critical national importance.

Or is it all a carefully crafted trap? Both encounter ghosts from the past in Sweden. Can their relationship survive what they uncover? Will they live long enough for that to matter?

15/04/2025

When the past comes back to haunt you. ‘The Danger of Life’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

This modern image gives a glimpse of Achnacarry Castle in Lochaber. The castle was the focal point of the Commando Basic Training Centre during the war and much of the story is set here. After the war it returned to its role as the ancestral home of Clan Cameron.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-dol/index.html

It’s October 1942. Group Captain Robert Sutherland’s first week in charge of Military Intelligence 11's operations in Scotland and northern England is not going smoothly. His efforts to find out who is behind an attempt to steal an advanced reconnaissance aircraft from a military airfield in Fife have not been helped by the death of the would-be thief.

An unwanted complication comes via a telephone call from Monique Dubois in MI5 in London. An operation she’s been running in Glasgow has gone badly wrong and she wants him to intervene before it’s entirely compromised.

Worse still, an investigation into a murder at the Commando Basic Training Centre in the Highlands takes a grim turn and Bob is drawn in personally. In Lochaber, the present war intersects with another conflict that took place two centuries earlier: with deadly consequences.

14/04/2025

One broch, two millennia, three murders. Ken Lussey’s latest novel ‘Thicker Than Water’ is a compelling murder mystery set in northern Scotland.

The Dornoch Castle Hotel in the heart of Dornoch in Sutherland has origins dating back to the 11th century, though what you see today is a little less old. The hotel is visited by the book’s central characters when they stay with friends in the town.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-ttw/index.html

Callum Anderson and Jenny Mackay are spending Hogmanay at Sarclet Castle in Caithness when they are asked to investigate the brutal murder of a young woman at nearby Sarclet Broch in 1943, a woman whose ghost is believed to haunt the castle.

What seems the coldest of cold cases is not the first murder of a young woman at the broch: there was another nearly two thousand years earlier. Nor is it the last. On the day that Callum and Jenny arrive, there is a third fatal stabbing there.

Their investigation into the 1943 murder uncovers shoddy police work and the possibility of a serial killer: but can anything be proved after eight decades? Meanwhile they find themselves drawn into the increasingly dangerous hunt for the latest murderer.

13/04/2025

How far would you go to right a wrong? ‘The House With 46 Chimneys’ is a spooky adventure story for younger readers involving a two-century-old family mystery and the haunting of Dunmore Park, a ruined house in central Scotland.

You get a sense of the sheer size of Dunmore Park from this view along the main cellar corridor running the length of the south range of the house. The cellars have a central role in the book as the story develops, both in the ruinous condition you see here and back when the house was complete and lived in.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-h46c/index.html

Life changes dramatically for Kaleb, Jude and Sequoia when they move to live with their aunt in a rural corner of central Scotland. But then life is changing dramatically for everyone. It’s the beginning of April 2020, the early days of the coronavirus lockdown. The roads are nearly empty of cars and the blue skies almost clear of aeroplanes.

Three local children they meet – in a socially distanced way – draw them into a two-century-old family mystery involving the haunting of the nearby ruins of Dunmore Park, 'The House With 46 Chimneys'. As the book builds to its climax, the children are faced with a decision. Do they try to right a wrong that was done in 1828, a wrong that has had consequences ever since? Or is doing so simply too dangerous?

12/04/2025

The siege is over but the war goes on. ‘The Eye of Horus’ is an atmospheric World War Two thriller with settings that move from the Highlands of Scotland via Gibraltar to Malta.

This modern view shows French Creek, one of the creeks on the south-east side of Malta’s Grand Harbour. During the war it was home to naval dockyards and was very heavily bombed. It has a central role in the book as the story reaches its dramatic conclusion.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-eoh/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-eoh/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s June 1943. Bob and Monique Sutherland are on honeymoon in Kyle of Lochalsh when an unexpected visitor arrives to spoil their idyll.

They agree to travel to Malta to search for two missing men, a young naval lieutenant and an MI6 officer who has disappeared while looking for him. The aerial siege of the island is over and the tide of war has turned but, after three years of bombing, Malta remains a shattered place.

The available leads produce more questions than answers and progress is impeded by lies. As Bob and Monique come closer to discovering what became of the two men, events take a dangerous turn and their priority shifts from enjoying their honeymoon to surviving it.

11/04/2025

How many deaths to end a war? ‘Eyes Turned Skywards’ is a fast-paced thriller set mainly in northern Scotland during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

Strathmore Lodge near Loch More in the heart of Caithness is an important location in the book.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-ets/index.html

Wing Commander Robert Sutherland has left his days as a pre-war detective far behind him. Or so he thinks. On the 25th of August 1942 the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, is killed in northern Scotland in an unexplained air crash and a second crash soon after suggests a shared, possibly sinister, cause.

Bob Sutherland is tasked with visiting the aircraft’s base in Oban and the first crash site in Caithness to try to uncover who might have sabotaged one, or both, of the aircraft.

Set against the background of a country that is far from united behind Winston Churchill and the ever-present threat from the enemy, we follow Bob as he unravels layers of deceit and intrigue far beyond anything he could have imagined.

10/04/2025

When the hunter becomes the prey. ‘The High Road’ is a fast-paced contemporary thriller set mainly in central Scotland and the far north-west.

The elusive Hermit’s Castle at Achmelvich on the west coast of Sutherland is visited by the book’s two central characters as they get to know each other. This remarkable concrete folly was built in 1950 and is sometimes known as Europe's smallest castle: though it’s a castle in name only.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-thr/index.html

Callum Anderson is in Scotland to scatter his father’s ashes when he’s asked by a cousin to look for her missing sister, Alexandra. With his life in London in tatters and suspended from duty by the Metropolitan Police, why not?

It soon becomes clear that Alex is on the run from a local criminal. But someone much more dangerous is after her too and sees Callum as a means of finding her and adding to a trail of bodies that extends across two countries.

After a brief entanglement with a Police Scotland anti-terrorist operation, Callum drops off the radar to follow the only lead he has left, which takes him to the far north-west of Scotland. But can he find Alex before his own hunter finds him?

09/04/2025

A game of secrets and lies. ‘Bloody Orkney’ is a fast-paced thriller set in Scotland, mainly in Orkney, during World War Two. It uses many real settings, transported eight decades back in time.

The harbour at Kirkwall is featured in the novel, as is the Kirkwall Hotel, which served as a naval headquarters during the war. Bob, Monique and the rest of the MI11 team stay in a fictional neighbouring hotel that just happens to share a location with the one shown in the photograph.

Find out more and buy the eBook as a Kindle, Kobo or Apple:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-blork/index.html
Buy the paperback edition here:
https://www.arachnid.scot/book-blork/buy.html
If you wish this can be signed and dedicated by the author at no extra cost.
For a limited time only, paperback sales are P&P free for UK purchasers.

It’s November 1942. Bob Sutherland, Monique Dubois and the Military Intelligence 11 team fly in to review security in Orkney, home to one of the most important and most heavily defended naval anchorages in the world.

But an unidentified body has been found. It becomes clear that powerful men have things they’d rather keep hidden and MI11’s arrival threatens the status quo. Then Bob stumbles over a ghost from his past and things get far too personal.

He and Monique are called away to resolve a crisis at a secret experimental base at Gruinard Bay in Wester Ross. When they return to Orkney, they find that the rules have been rewritten and they are in very real danger.

Arachnid Press