Under the Haar

Under the Haar A DI Cormac Buchan Investigation - Raymond StoneA man everyone trusted. A murder nobody could read. A fog that keeps the coast's secrets.When Sir Gregor Mowat, oil magnate turned philanthropist, is found dead beneath a ladder in the walled garden of his Deeside estate, everyone from the Fiscal to the front page wants it to be a burglary gone wrong. DI Cormac Buchan, a rumpled, endlessly polite detective in an ancient wax jacket, keeps noticing wee things that don't fit: glass lying on top of rain-wet soil, a ladder that never bore a man's weight, a whisky glass washed and put back on the wrong shelf.The trail leads back thirty-five years, to the sinking of the standby vessel Northern Rose and the five Peterhead men who went down with her - a tragedy the dead man was ten days from confessing to in his memoirs. But the motive isn't the revenge everyone assumes, and it isn't the old cover-up either. It is something meaner, hiding inside the atonement itself.Set between the granite streets of Aberdeen and the fog-bound fishing towns of the North East, Under the Haar is a crime novel about silence bought with kindness, the ledgers the weather keeps, and a detective nobody takes seriously until it is far too late.