Elaine Thomson reveals title of next book [2]

Here, on May 11, 2024, we rather exitedly published the news that Elaine Thomson's next book would be titled 'The Caithness Poltergeist'.

[Not (yet) the actual cover]

Alas, on January 3rd, 2025, the title of her next mystery seemed to have been mysteriously changed to 'Hawthorn: A Scottish Ghost Story'. See here.

It's a bit of a non-title and 'Laesk House' would have been a much better one. Besides, that one would have been a perfect fit with most of the other titles.

More information
On the 4th of February 2025, more news about the upcoming series of books has been revealed: Hawthorn will be the first in a planned quartet of novels, each set in a different part of Scotland at the four 'turning points' of the year: Samhain (or Halloween), the spring equinox, midsummer and midwinter.

Still, the summary of the plot sounds interesting:

Caithness, October 1871.

The Ordnance Survey are charting Scotland's most remote north-easterly county, a bleak landscape of endless moorland and lonely crofts. When a strange vision leads cartographer Robert Sutherland out onto the moor one night, an accident leaves him inches from death. He is taken to Leask House, to recuperate under the care of Mrs Sinclair and her beautiful daughter Isabel.

At first, Robert thinks the dreadful visions that plague him at Leask House are the result of the laudanum he has been prescribed. But as events take ever stranger and more terrifying turns, Robert begins to wonder whether his presence at Leask House is really a coincidence at all.

Someone - or something - has summoned him here.

And they don't intend for him to leave.

[Update 14th March, 2025] Elaine Thomson is already writing the second in what will become a quartet of novels featuring the solstices and the equinoxes: the spring equinox, midsummer, the Samhain (or Halloween), and midwinter. She post an image of a map of the island of Stroma accompanied with the words '… and this is where my next ghost story is set #amwriting #stroma #caithness #midsummer #ghoststory'.

Stroma is an uninhabited island in the Pentland Firth, between Orkney and the mainland of Scotland. It forms part of the civil parish of Canisbay in Caithness, in the council area of Highland. The name Stroma can be traced back to the Old Norse Straumey, from straumr ('stream' or 'current') and the suffix -ey ('island'). Together they mean 'island in the current'.