Broch provides backdrop for new murder mystery set in Caithness
Caithness is the setting for a newly published murder mystery featuring three killings in the same location at different points in history.
Thicker Than Water, by Ken Lussey, is centred around the fictional Sarclet Broch but many real places in the far north are mentioned in the narrative.
The 67-year-old author has no known family links to the far north but has felt an affinity with Caithness since passing through as a student in the late 1970s while working on his first book, A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Great Britain.
Thicker Than Water is Ken’s 11th book. It tells of Callum Anderson and Jenny Mackay, who are spending Hogmanay at Sarclet Castle and end up investigating the killing of a young woman at the nearby Sarclet Broch in 1943.
It turns out there was another murder at the broch almost 2000 years earlier – and nor is it the last.
Ken explained: “I chose Caithness for the setting of Thicker Than Water because it’s an area I love. It’s also an area I’ve revisited a couple of times in my books.
“Thicker Than Water is the third in my series of contemporary thrillers/murder mysteries and all have been set in northern Scotland.
“I’ve also written a series of six thrillers set in Scotland, and beyond, during World War II. The first of these, published in 2018, was called Eyes Turned Skywards and took as its starting point the real air crash in August 1942 that killed the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, at Eagle’s Rock, inland from Dunbeath.
“The fictional Sarclet Castle, which has a central role in Thicker Than Water, first appeared in Eyes Turned Skywards and I had a lot of fun bringing together my fictional worlds of 1942/43 and 2023/24 to provide a backdrop to Thicker Than Water.”
Thicker Than Water was published as an eBook by Arachnid Press in September. It is available through Amazon, Kobo and Apple.
“Initial feedback has been very positive,” Ken said. “Readers of my contemporary books enjoy it as a murder mystery with the twist of having three murders at the same location that are widely separated in time, while I’ve also heard from readers who have come to it from my World War II thrillers and like the way the timelines of the two series converge in places in the book.”
Ken grew up on various RAF stations around the world and is based in Livingston.
He has also written a spooky adventure story for younger readers entitled The House With 46 Chimneys, set against the background of the early days of the coronavirus lockdown and published in late 2020.
His first book, A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Great Britain, was published by Penguin Books in 1983.
Ken said: “It was while I was doing the groundwork for that book as a student in the late 1970s that I first visited Caithness, standing with my thumb out on the side of various roads that are much busier today than they were then.”
In Thicker Than Water, Sarclet Castle is based loosely on the Castle of Mey, while Sarclet Broch is based on the Broch of Gurness in Orkney. Caithness and Sutherland locations in the story include Sarclet Haven, the Castle of Old Wick, Castle Sinclair Girnigoe, Old St Peter’s Kirk in Thurso, Dunnet Head, Dunbeath, Helmsdale and Dornoch Cathedral.
