That’ll be 2024, then. Its tea’s oot and its pie’s cauld, as we say in Scotland. It’s been an eventful year for your present narrator. I published three books and […]
(Pictured: Helen MacDougall at the time of the trial) Aided by their partners, Helen MacDougall and Maggie Laird, killers William Burke and William Hare are in the money. But they […]
(Pictured: Maggie Laird at the time of the trial) Burke and Hare are two of Scotland’s most notorious murderers, but they were aided and abetted by two women. In the […]
They called them bodysnatchers but they weren’t. They were murderers. And they didn’t work alone. SCOTLAND is only a small country but it has many cases of foul murder that […]
Controversy has dogged Scotland’s Not Proven verdict for decades. Douglas Skelton looks at the history of the ‘Bastard Verdict’ HERE’S a wee legal riddle: When can a man be cleared […]
My reading for pleasure during May Hunted by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker) With its neat twist in the direction the usual terrorist thrillers take, ‘Hunted’ is extremely well told and […]
I do a lot of reading, all writers do – or at least should. Reading all kinds of genres is the best learning resource I know. If you want to […]
Being a child of the 60s – yes, I know you all thought I was only in my 30s – it’s surprising that I have never smoked. Back then smoking […]
Nine years following the Castle Toward case, a woman who poisoned her neighbour and a lodger caused something a fashion sensation – for the tartan she wore was subsequently shunned […]
POISON, they say, is a woman’s weapon, the perception being that there is something decidedly unmanly in slipping a victim a noxious substance rather than facing up to him with […]