The Shadow of the Black Earl

In The Shadow of the Black Earl, Leo Moran – connoisseur, private investigator, seer of visions – sets out from the splendid isolation of his Glasgow apartment to spend the summer with his new chum Fordyce Greatorix, whom he befriended during his previous adventure. Leo, recently bereaved, hopes to find solace at Fordyce’s sumptuous manor house Biggnarbriggs Hall in Kirkcudbrightshire. He is overjoyed when romance unexpectedly blossoms, but he soon finds himself once again haunted by visions after a local girl goes missing, an incident which has chilling echoes of a similar disappearance thirty years previously. And as he investigates a host of curious and dubious characters, Leo finds that the very bedrock which surrounds Biggnarbriggs Hall is fretted with an ancient malevolence that will have its terrible reckoning.
 
In Leo Moran and the Golden Ratio, a wealthy Scots family procure the services of our hero to solve the disappearance of their youngest daughter Kirstin. This novel is the prequel to The Killing of Helen Addison and finds our somewhat younger Leo in a vulnerable state. He has only recently been discharged from a mental hospital, having suffered a serious breakdown, and is teetering on relapsing into alcohol abuse. The case, which involves a soul-destroying chase around Continental Europe during which Leo is wracked with nightmarish visions, will bring him to the brink of his sanity, and the fulcrum of pure evil against which he brushes threatens to throw him into spiritual disorder.

Leo Moran and the Golden Ratio