J N Catanach

Lullaby for the Dead J N Catanach

Central Africa, 1881: A motley band of Scottish Missionaries, funded by a Committee in far away Edinburgh, find themselves in precarious occupancy of a few square miles of the temperate Shiré Highlands (in today's Malawi) conceded to them by the local paramount chief.

Captain Monteith Fergusson, lately of Her Imperial Majesty's army in India, nervously awaits his fiancée, stranded at Senhora Maria's guesthouse on the lower Zambezi by an uprising due to Portuguese incursions. Calamity leads to calamity, and then to murder.

"The evidence which I have carefully pieced together points steadily at me," confides Monteith-assigned to investigate the crime-to his diary. "There's even a plausible motive. Yet can I honestly stand up and say, 'I killed him, ' without the slightest recollection of having done so? I feel like judge and jury, prosecution and defense at my own trial. I shall go mad unless I see the bottom of it. Could this be some strange mental derangement brought on by-by what? By Africa itself?"