Charles E McGarry
Welcome to the world of Leo Moran, crime fiction with a distinctly supernatural flavour.
Our hero is a singular fellow. Cultured and erudite, he is a lonely man with a formidable capacity for alcohol whose pomposity is a regular source of humour. Leo is endowed with a strange and awesome gift: he sees visions pertaining to terrible crimes. These episodes, along with his deductive talents, help him bring the perpetrators to justice. His endeavours bring him into uneasy alliances with the police, and stretch his relationship with his friend, Stephanie, a QC whose materialistic, worldly outlook contrasts with Leo’s old-fashioned, Catholic perspective.
In The Shadow of the Black Earl, Leo 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.
Moran is a new and unique addition to the Scots crime fiction roster. Like its predecessor, this is very well written and always thrilling Daily Record
Charles E McGarry is a Scottish author. His first novel in the Leo Moran series of detective fiction, The Ghost of Helen Addison, was published in July 2017 to rave reviews. The follow-up, The Shadow of the Black Earl, was published in September 2018. His third Leo Moran book, The Mystery of the Strange Piper, will be published by BackPage Press in September 2021. Charles is also the co-author of the critically-acclaimed The Road to Lisbon, a novel set against the backdrop of Celtic's victory in the European Cup in 1967.
