This is the story of a dangerous dig at a standing stone circle on a remote Hebridean Island. A motley crew of American and British professionals and amateurs gather for an archaeological dig into prehistoric burial rites. The quarter are cramped, cold and Scottish summer soggy. Tempers are already simmering when a bagpipe playing, crime enthusiast American is found dead in his tent. Then another of the crew dies mysteriously.

Afraid for her life fellow digger and forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson, in love with myth and Celtic folklore, probes the rocky topsoil for a reason behind the aura of death that seems to hover over them. Is the excavation cursed by the ancient dead ... or is there more modern and sinister explanation behind the group's strangely rising mortality rate.

One of the assets of this book is the subtle wit the author uses. It is a murder mystery with many light touches of humor. When Elizabeth arrives in the United Kingdom and she and her Scottish boy friend are driving north to meet the crew in Edinburgh she sees what she thinks is heather for the first time.

"Look! cried Elizabeth seeing a flash a purple on the roadside. "Heather!"

Cameron did not spare a glance out the window. "Rosebay willow herb, I expect." He told her. "Heather doesn't grow on roadways in Hampshire, dear.

"It is very pretty, though."

"It is a weed. We had to slave to keep them out of the garden. My father says that during the war willow herb was the first plant to grow in the ruins of a bomb site."

"How lovely!" Elizabeth cried. "Like a condolence card from Nature."

The reader will find many funny scenes of Elizabeth reacting to the Scotch environment as most newcomers do on their first trip to the beloved land.

Another strength of this book are the detailed descriptions of the what it is like to spend time on a small Hebridean Islands shrouded in mist and history. For example:

Banrigh, appearing from a distance like a black seal floating on the surface of the ocean, was one of several thousand uninhabited islands off the northern coast of Scotland It lay dead and silent in the dark sea, its rocky cliffs shining like bones washed up on the barren beach. In winter the island would be a gray shell shrouded in mist, cold and wet and empty. Even now in the bright summer sunshine some trace of this starkness remained in the sharp outlines of the rocks. The stone circle was not visible from the sea, but its presence seemed to make itself felt, reminding the visitor of prehistoric rituals and sacrifice before the old gods. It made one think, too, of the shipwrecks that must have brought death time and again to the rocky shores.

The passengers in the launch shivered as they looked at the dark island ahead, each thinking that he alone must have imagined such romantic nonsense. But the feeling was there.

Unlike most of Scotland's islands, Banrigh was fertile enough and just large enough to have supported a struggling population of farmer-fishermen, but by the early twentieth century, the last of the islanders had given up their precarious existence in the back of beyond and had moved to larger islands like Skye. One or two daring ones had even gone as far afield as Inverness on the mainland, leaving the island to the gales and to the ghosts of its ancient inhabitants: those who had built the stone circle, for reasons no one remembered.

Mountains of coarse-grained black gabbro formed the spine of the island, ice-eroded over the centuries into steep walled corries and long scree runs of broken rock. Over this ancient, sterile skeleton a more recent outcrop of limestone tone softened the island with stone-studded green fields and a scattering of elder bush and rowan trees. Except for a small plateau on the west side, leading to a rocky channel; three sides of the island were barricaded from the sea by steep bare cliffs that looked axe-carved from a distance, but on the eastern shore the fringe of limestone stretched out to form a rough beach of pebbles and old shells. It was there that the odd private boat would put to shore; mostly Celtophiles or National Trust photographers wanting a look at the Banrigh standing stones. Even that was a rare occurrence. Callanish, the stone circle on Lewis, was both more impressive and more accessible. Banrigh, much off the beaten track, was left alone.

The ruins of the village were visible from the beach; a scattering of "black houses," dirt-floored dwellings built of stacked boulders, with holes in the thatched roofs for the smoke from the peat fire that was kept burning within. The cottages, long unroofed and empty, wouldn't even provide shelter from a mild summer night. Luckily, the Banrigh expedition would not be needing them. The object of their study lay on the other side of the island, as did the island's other ruined dwelling where they were destined to make their camp. Elizabeth looked about her at the flash of white breakers across the cold blue depths, and at the clouds of lapwing overhead. "This doesn't look anything like Appalachia," she murmured, and Cameron smiled.

With all this humor and detailed description of the Hebrides the book's central theme is a intriguing murder mystery. They are not just ordinary murders and before we find the answer we become involved in a terror that can only happen as history meets the present.

Scottish Radiance is an Associate of Amazon.com Books and you can order this book from them by going to Paying the Piper.