The Mourning Ring

Some secrets are buried. Some are sealed in gold. Some have been waiting eighty years to be found.

When author Coby McTavish brings his family to the brooding clifftop halls of Serpent's Manor for the birth of his child, he expects chaos. He gets considerably more. 

A midwife who is not what she seems. A black cat that appears from nowhere and answers to no one. A booming voice inside his head that knows things it has no right to know. And on the rocks far below the cliff's edge, discovered by accident and unearthed by a drone in the hands of a teenage boy, the skeletal remains of a young woman — along with a small, ornate, gilded ring that has been waiting in the darkness since the last year of the Second World War. 

The ring carries an inscription. A date. A hidden compartment. And a message so dangerous that its owner died before she could deliver it. 

As a killer stalks the manor's corridors, a detective with blue eyes and impeccable timing arrives to complicate everything, and the ghosts of Grimloch grow restless in ways that cannot be explained and cannot be ignored, Coby finds himself drawn into a mystery that reaches from the present all the way back to the blackouts and betrayals of 1945 — and to a woman named Daisy, who has been trying to tell him something for a very long time. 

The Mourning Ring is the fifth instalment in The McTavish Chronicles — a gothic mystery series soaked in Scottish atmosphere, dark humour, family chaos, and the persistent, unsettling sense that the dead are never quite as gone as we would like them to be. 

Some rings are given in love. Some are given in warning. This one was given by a ghost.