The Burning Glass

What reviewers are saying about
The Burning Glass

Authentic dialect, detailed descriptions of
the castle and environs, and vivid characters recreate an area rich
in history and legend. The tightly woven plot is certain to delight
history fans with its dramatic collision of past and present.
(Sept.)—
Publishers Weekly

A little romance, a dash of mystery and a
soupcon of history make a hearty dish.—
Kirkus Reviews
.

Carl also plays with expectations and often
turns them on their heads surprising not only the characters but
the reader. I loved this book for the characters, the ambiance, the
history and culture of Scotland, and the ripping good story.—Gayle
Surrette,
Gumshoe Review

The third in a series,
The Burning
Glass
is an entertaining mystery that can be read and enjoyed
on its own - great for readers who are craving something light and
fun.—Becky Lejeune,
www.bookbitch.com

If you took one of the better
X-Files
episodes and turned it into a mystery novel with more mature
characters, you would end up with something very like
The
Burning Glass
. In Carl’s previous books, Jean and Alasdair turn
their attentions to the lost treasure of Bonnie Prince Charlie and
the Loch Ness monster. These sound like too much fun to
miss.—Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at
http://reviewedbyliz.com

Book Three of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair
Cameron series

Lillian Stewart Carl

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2010 by Lillian Stewart Carl

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of this author.

To Aidan Sutton Carl, Simran Ravi Carl, and
Maya Sutton Carl. The next generation.

If two’s company and three’s a crowd,
thought Jean Fairbairn,
then an Edinburgh sidewalk during the
Festival is infinity verging upon insanity.

Chanting “excuse me, pardon me, sorry,” she
fought her way through the stream of pedestrians, dodged between a
blue-painted, dreadlocked youth and the tourist taking his photo,
and darted into the door of her office building. There she patted
herself down. Mini-backpack, check. Manila folder, check. Cool. No,
she’d been losing her cool in large chunks, like icebergs falling
off a glacier, for quite some time now.

She stepped carefully up the spiral turnpike
stair. The elongated triangles of the stone treads had been worn by
centuries of feet into shapes resembling melted Brie, and injuring
herself by falling up a staircase was just the sort of thing she
was likely to do. Ditto for injuring herself right before running
away with her lover . . . She wasn’t running away, she told
herself. And she and Alasdair weren’t lovers. Not yet, anyway. Not
in the full-body-cavity-search meaning of the word. Although the
meeting of true minds counted as an intimate connection.

The
Great Scot
offices might be
several stories up, but still the clamor of voices, amplified
music, and tooting horns drifted through the windows along with the
August heat and the perennial scents of diesel and cooking food. As
Jean shut the door, the fresh-faced youth behind the reception desk
looked up. “Ah, it’s yourself, is it?”

“It is, Gavin, a rat leaving the sinking
ship. Not that Edinburgh’s sinking. Teeming ship, maybe. Leaping
off the ark. Are lemmings rodents, do you know? I may be a rat, but
I haven’t got an ounce of lemming blood.”

He stared, petrified in the act of lifting a
mug to his lips. For seven months now they’d worked together, and
still he occasionally looked at her as though she were speaking in
tongues. Not that it was her American tongue that baffled him.
Gavin was a smart kid, but when it came to following her mental
arabesques, he was no Alasdair.

Although even Alasdair might be nonplussed at
the lemming remark. “Never mind,” Jean said. “Is Miranda here? Or
is she off on the cocktail and show-opening circuit?”

The cup completed its journey to Gavin’s
lips, and he swallowed a fortifying swig. “Oh aye, she’s here just
now. Had me buying tickets for the Puppetry of the Peni . . . Well,
mind, the lads that use their, well . . .” His cheeks colored, not,
probably, at the raunchiness of either title or concept but at
mentioning them to a woman of his mother’s generation. Jean wished
she’d seen his face when Miranda asked him to order the
tickets.

The competition for audiences at the Festival
Fringe meant that each show was more outrageous than the last.
World-wise and world-easy Miranda would be entertained by a program
straining at an envelope that was just fine in its original shape,
thank you. Jean, though, was likely to turn scarlet, wince, or
guffaw. Or all three. Especially since her thoughts were already
playing delicately with aspects of male anatomy. One male. One
anatomy. Connected to a psyche that could never be contained in an
envelope.

Partly taking pity on Gavin, partly to
conceal her own blush, she turned to inspect the stack of mail by
the door. A letter with her name handwritten on a cream-colored
envelope sat atop several press kits and beside the current issue
of
The Scotsman
.

A notice on the newspaper’s front page read:
“Stanelaw councillor goes missing. See page 4.”
Stanelaw?
Great. Just the village Jean wanted to see in the news yet again,
when she was booked to spend two weeks there. First a famous
antiquity had been stolen from the local museum, and now some
functionary . . . She hadn’t even read the article yet, and already
she was drawing dire conclusions. It would all turn out to be
either a tempest in a Brown Betty teapot or something that was
beyond her ken—if not beyond her brief as a journalist.

She collected the newspaper and the letter,
left the press releases for Miranda to winnow, and pitched the
manila folder onto Gavin’s desk as she headed for her office. “My
expense account.”

If he hadn’t quite regained his composure, he
was at least no longer decomposing. “It’s not been two months since
you were running up bills at Loch Ness. Now she’s sending you to
the Borders, is she?”

“Miranda and I,” Jean said, reminding him
that she was a full partner in the history-and-travel magazine,
“decided to kill several stories with the same stone. And I use the
word ‘kill’ advisedly,” she added, with paranoia aforethought.

“No surprise you’d go turning up the murder
mysteries. They’re stories, aren’t they now?” Gavin added the
folder to one of the piles leaning against his desk like flying
buttresses. The lad had learned his filing techniques from
Miranda—and both of them could find what they were looking for as
quickly as Jean could with her tidily labeled files. It wasn’t fair
that the neatness of one’s records was in inverse proportion to the
neatness of one’s life.

Gavin had also learned to repeat Miranda’s
justifications of Jean’s unintended but still perilous adventures.
“Right,” she said, and realized she was imitating Alasdair’s
noncommittal coolth.

The editorial offices of
Great Scot
magazine occupied one story of a stone-built tenement, a medieval
building that, like its neighbors, was tall, thin, and stern as a
Calvinist elder. The scuffed pitch-pine floor of the hall creaked
even without the pressure of footsteps, and furtive drafts rustled
among the papers, so that every now and then Jean would find
herself watching a page in a book turn by itself. But her allergy
to the paranormal had never sniffled there, let alone exploded in a
full apparitional sneeze. The rooms that had housed generations of
people living, loving, dying, now held no resonances of them at
all. That was just as well. Encountering a few souls who were not
resting in peace was enough to make Jean grateful that so many
were.

Miranda was sitting at her desk, holding the
telephone receiver with her left hand and typing on her computer
keyboard with her right. Jean waved, but there was no reason to
stop and say, “Speak now or hold your peace until I get back.” With
cell phones, e-mail, and several good highways between Edinburgh
and Stanelaw, she was hardly going to be out of touch.

Miranda waggled her keyboard hand toward the
door, rings glinting, and said into the telephone, “Oh aye, we’re
after adding a Tours and Travels page to the website.”

And
Great Scot
territory expanded,
Jean told herself. Soon there would be Miranda Capaldi action
figures, complete with miniature computer, cup of café latte, and
social register.

Her own office was a room that had been
called a closet by the eighteenth-century household, and by
twenty-first century standards was no more than a cupboard with a
window. The trapped air was so hot and humid she could have raised
orchids on her desk. Her books, manuscripts, magazines, and prints
were limp and musty. This time of year, in her old office at the
university in Texas, she’d have shivered beneath the vent of an
air-conditioning system set to give frostbite to a penguin. Not
that frigidity had defined all her former life as an academic, just
too much of it. When she’d broken free, she’d done so with a
vengeance, reporting a student for plagiarism and thereby
initiating an academic scandal that had ended in court.

Jean threw open the casement window to be
rewarded by a gust of noise like a slap in the face.
The
Borders
, she thought with a sigh. Ferniebank Castle was half a
mile from Stanelaw, which in turn was three miles from Kelso.
Neither community was a metropolitan hub. No one except a tourist
or two would disturb the peace and quiet. Ferniebank wasn’t yet a
prime attraction on the theme-park-Scotland route, although with
the new development, it would be.

Stanelaw. The theft. The councillor. Before
she could open the newspaper, a brisk tap of boot heels announced
Miranda’s entrance. Today her hair was stroked upwards and frosted
at the tips, and she was wearing a denim jacket studded with
crystals over flared jeans. Despite her own plain-vanilla twill
pants, cotton blouse, and tapestry vest, Jean did not descend to
making cracks about rhinestone cowgirls.

“You’re away, then?” her friend and partner
asked.

“My bags are packed and ready to go, but by
the time I stocked up for two entire weeks, I had to go ahead and
hire the car yesterday. Now it’ll take me forever to get out of
town.”

“Not a bit of it. The traffic’s coming into
the town. You’ll be missing all the fun. I’ve got extra tickets for
the Tattoo this weekend. Massed pipe bands. Loads of men wearing
kilts.”

“Gavin tells me that’s not all you have
tickets for.”

Miranda grinned. “Where’s your sense of
adventure?”

“Yeah, I know. Party pooper. Wet blanket.
Going off with Alasdair is a pretty big step for me.”

“Your first dirty weekend together, eh? A
dirty two weeks, come to that.” The arches of Miranda’s beautifully
plucked eyebrows made question marks, inviting confidences. But the
days were long gone—twenty years gone—when they had sat giggling in
their dorm room, comparing the mating rituals of British and
American boys.