The Secret Portrait
by Lillian Stewart Carl

Jean Fairbairn is a burned-out American academic working for a Scottish travel and history magazine. She writes articles on, as she puts it, how the legend meets the road and often blows a tire. In The Secret Portrait, an old man comes to her with a three hundred year old gold coin he's just discovered in the Western Highlands-where, he adds, he trained as a commando during World War II. Jean knows that one of Scotland's most famous (or infamous) historical figures, Bonnie Prince Charlie, hid barrels of gold coins in that area, coins that were never found. She and her ambitious partner/editor decide she should write about the coin. But the old man won't tell where he found it. Did he find it on the property of an American dot-com millionaire, Rick MacLyon, who's just rebuilt an old house in the area?

Jean heads for the Highlands, and finds not a hoard of gold coins but a murder—and a police detective named Alasdair Cameron. Alasdair is an intelligent cop who is suffering from his own case of burn-out. At first he's suspicious of Jean. Soon, though, he realizes she's an innocent bystander, one who has historical knowledge essential to solving the case.

Jean however, doesn't see herself as innocent. The more questions she asks, the more she's afraid she had a role, however unwitting, in the murder. She has a moral obligation to face whatever danger she attracts by helping Alasdair-and to face the ghost that walks the mansion's dark corridors.

The solution to the mystery is rooted not just in contemporary tartan fantasy, but also in events dating back to World War II and beyond, all the way to 1745 and Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion. That solution brings Jean and Alasdair together personally as well as professionally. Emotionally burned as they both are, though, togetherness is as difficult as finding a murderer.

Other Books by Lillian Stewart Carl

Murder by Magic
Twenty Tales of Crime and the Supernatural

Lucifer's Crown

Time Enough to Die

Ashes to Ashes

Shadows in Scarlet

Memory and Desire

Lillian Stewart Carl's Bio

After growing up in Missouri and Ohio and spending many years in North Texas, I've developed a passion for mountains and oceans, particularly the ones in Scotland, which is heaven's front porch and which I visit as often as possible. In my youth I was lucky enough to travel to other parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, and Japan.

While I've worked a few "real" jobs, as an engineering aide, a librarian, a newspaper columnist, and a college history teacher, all along I was writing stories and critiques first for my desk drawer and then for fan magazines. My first professional fiction was published in the Amazons II anthology in 1982.

My husband is a retired geophysicist. Our two adult sons are in advertising and computers respectively. We have a cat, a thirteen-pound tabby, and an assortment of houseplants I view as rentals -- how long can I keep them before they die? Our home is a tract house cleverly disguised as a book-lined cloister.

My hobbies (or what I do when I'm trying to avoid working) include needlepoint and knitting, bread-baking, music (particularly Celtic folk/rock), gardening, public television, walking and yoga, and crossword puzzles.

Unlike more methodical writers, I never sat up one day and said, "I'm going to start writing now". I've always written, just as I've always read. Just as I've always breathed, for that matter. And I've been aided and abetted since the age of twelve by my best friend, science fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold.

If I could be anything other than a writer (as if!) I'd probably be a librarian.

Over the years I've been inventing my own genre, mystery/romance with supernatural/ historical/ mythological underpinnings. And I've become a firm believer in the odd synchronies of the writing life. Soon after finishing Ashes to Ashes, for example, which is about a woman from Missouri named Rebecca working in a replica of a Scottish castle, I visited the real castle and discovered the tour guide was a woman from Oklahoma named Rebecca.

I am a member or former member of SFWA, MWA, Sisters in Crime, Novelists, Inc., and The Author's Guild.

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