Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape and even murder. Betrayed by those she most trusted, she would be lured into a deadly game of power, only to lose to her envious and unforgiving cousin, Elizabeth I....

There are five Jemima Shore tales, including her first case, which took place when she was fifteen and still at her convent school, the school featured later in Jemima's career in Quiet as a Nun. Jemima is at her sparkling best as she solves the case of the Parr children in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands and elegantly deals with the case of the missing bride on a romantic Venetian honeymoon. Nor is she afraid to get wet at the Holland Pools where in-laws feud and plot. Relatives are also closely involved in the murder at Arcangelo's Salon, where Jemima has her hair...

Here, Jemima Shore, investigator and TV personality, arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday. The sun is shining. Paradise, she thinks. But at that moment, she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral."

So begins an adventure far removed from Jemima's visions of heather-covered hills, crystal-clear streams, romantic men in kilts, fairy-tale castles....Instead, she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions, its jealousies, and its violence, in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting...