Stap terug in het 16e-eeuwse Schotland met deze boeiende mysterieserie rond de jonge advocaat Hew Cullan. Terwijl hij zich een weg baant door het intellectuele en spirituele landschap van universiteitssteden, ontrafelt Cullan complexe zaken van moord en bedrog. Elke zaak dompelt lezers onder in een wereld van smeulende passies, verborgen verlangens en de harde realiteit van religieuze en sociale onrust. Bereid u voor op een reis door een samenleving die wordt gekenmerkt door haar soberheid, waar intellectuele ambities botsen met gevaarlijke geheimen.
1579, St. Andrews. A thirteen-year old boy meets his death on the streets of the university city of St. Andrews and suspicion falls upon one of the regents at the university, Nicholas Colp. Hew Cullan, a young lawyer recently returned home from Paris, uncovers a complex tale of passion and duplicity, of sexual desire and tension within the repressive atmosphere of the Protestant Kirk and the austerity of the academic cloister.
The year is 1581, and the young St Andrews academic Hew Cullan is unhappy with his life and disillusioned with the law. After his father's death he is invited by the advocate Richard Cunningham to complete his legal education in Edinburgh as Richard's pupil at the bar. Among his father's things Hew finds a manuscript entitled 'In Defence of the Law', directed to the Edinburgh printer, Christian Hall. At first, he resists its influence, but when a young girl is found dead on the beach at St Andrews, he is left unsettled and confused. He resolves to take the book to press and agrees to Richard's offer. Embarking on his new life in the capital, he falls in love. His relationships are fraught with lies and secrets and lead to brutal murder on the borough muir. Hew suspects a link with the dead girl on the beach. As he begins his desperate search to find the killer, he finds that the truth lies closer to home.
1582, St Andrews. In the swell of a storm, a ship is wrecked in the harbour. The only survivor is a young Flemish sailor. The cargo brings devastation to the town as squabbling turns to tragedy. Hew traces the ship to its source in Ghent, where he uncovers a strange secret and finds his principles tested to the core --
St Andrews, 1583. The young king James VI is confined at Falkland palace, plotting his escape. Dissension rages between Kirk and Crown, the king and his 'lord enterprisers', and between the separate factions of the church. In St Andrews Castle, a bishop in decline plays out his darkest fantasies, while Hew and his friend Giles investigate the true source of his sickness, uncovering corruption at its heart. The death of a young soldier, implicating Hew's sister and Giles's wife Meg, leads Hew to an astonishing discovery, and towards his blackest hour, his fortunes inextricable from those of James himself. Real historical figures interwoven in this fantastical tale are James VI, the bastard son of James V, spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and Alison Pearson who was executed for witchcraft in 1588.
1587. Three years after his enforced departure to London, Hew is reconciled with King James VI and recalled to Scotland. He elopes to St Andrews with a young Englishwoman. The death of Mary, Queen of Scots has unleashed a wave of anti-English sentiment among the Scottish people, and fear and confusion in the king himself. James will grant his blessing to their controversial marriage on the condition that Hew discovers what lies behind a painting cunningly contrived to prick the young king's conscience - an anamorphic death's-head with his mother's face.