When genial amateur detective, Alistair MacTavish takes a much anticipated holiday in the South Downs, which was supposed to be a peaceful rest, he finds fate has other plans in store for him. Should he follow his instinct or dismiss his well-known imagination and its developing theory as absurd? For the missing Findlay McQuarrie, Alzheimer's may have dimmed his immediate perceptions, but not enough to stop his crucial help. Both Alistair's instinct and Findlay's limited brightness play their extraordinary and intriguing part in trying to solve a wicked crime. Once again, Robert Irvine has written a thought-provoking mystery with a fine series of surprises, twists and turns.

This is a fast-moving tale of passion and politics. In Prince Otto, first published in serial form in 1885, Stevenson uses his genius for adventure and romance to explore some decidedly grown-up themes. The tiny 19th-century German state of Grunewald seems to be a principality of the world of fairy-tale. But its ruler is beset in public by the forces of modern politics, and troubled in private by an unhappy marriage. Ill-prepared to deal with either, Otto is forced to choose between them. This first fully edited edition of the novel will provoke readers to think again about the scope and purpose of Stevenson's brilliant story-telling. It explores the most modern of themes, the moral compromises required by marriage: a romance in which the marriage of the hero and the heroine is not the happy conclusion of the plot, but the problem that the plot has to resolve. It is a fascinating text for what it tells us about Stevenson's goals and aspirations at this crucial stage of his career, and about the changing nature of the novel in English at the end of the 19th-century.

When genial amateur detective, Alistair MacTavish takes a much anticipated holiday in the South Downs, which was supposed to be a peaceful rest, he finds fate has other plans in store for him. Should he follow his instinct or dismiss his well-known imagination and its developing theory as absurd? For the missing Findlay McQuarrie, Alzheimer's may have dimmed his immediate perceptions, but not enough to stop his crucial help. Both Alistair's instinct and Findlay's limited brightness play their extraordinary and intriguing part in trying to solve a wicked crime. Once again, Robert Irvine has written a thought-provoking mystery with a fine series of surprises, twists and turns.

When Henrietta Carr takes over as vicar of St Peter's Church in Cookington on the outskirts of London, not everyone is thrilled by her sex, her high and mighty ways and her appeal to men. And she has a past - one which catches up with her, fatally, on the allotments near her beloved church. Who could take issues of ritual and gardening to the point of murder? Who of the men in Henrietta's life would want her dead? These questions confront genial amateur detective Alistair MacTavish, called in by the dead woman's husband, Dennis, when the police have drawn a blank over her murder. Alistair has his own issues to face when his new-found love, Zoe, turns out to have a connection with one of Henrietta's former boyfriends. Can he keep faith with Zoe, hunt down the killer unscathed, and rediscover his own dormant faith in the process? Robert Irvine's thought-provoking murder mystery finds fertile soil in Cookington's allotments. The result is a rich mix of modern morals, local heroics and heady romance.

This volume includes a selection of Scottish writing from one of its most innovative periods, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It ranges across literary genres from the controversial 'translations' of James Macpherson's Ossian poems to the prose polemic of Thomas Carlyle. It includes a wide selection from the poetry of Robert Burns and the short fiction of James Hogg, and the complete texts of Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and John Galt's novel Annals of the Parish. Footnotes elucidate historical and other references, and Scots words are fully glossed. The introduction places these texts in the dynamic historical context in which this extraordinary literary flourishing occurred.Robert Irvine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of books on Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.

This volume includes a selection of Scottish writing from the 'renaissance' of Scottish writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. From the Highland and Lowland idylls of Fiona Macleod, Ian Maclaren, and J.M. Barrie to James Thomson's nightmare city and John Davidson's proto-Modernist portrayals of disillusioned consciousness and the urban scene; from the sophisticated short fiction of Helen Findlater, Violet Jacob and Willa Muir to the politically-committed theatre of Joe Corrie, these texts represent a cross-section of the ways in which Scottish writers responded to the challenges of advanced industrial and imperial society. Footnotes elucidate historical and other references, and Scots words are fully glossed. The introduction describes the literary and historical background against which these texts can be understood. Robert Irvine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of books on Tobias Smollett, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.