The Map Under the Rowan

At the National Library of Scotland, curator Isla MacKenzie knows how to expose a forgery: paper, pigment, provenance, pressure. The map delivered to her desk should reveal itself under scrutiny.

It is dated 1746. It depicts a glen now drowned beneath a reservoir. And every test says it is real.

The only trail leads to a remote estate and Alasdair Veitch, its last heir, who has spent forty years refusing to read beyond page three of a family ledger. He wants the map authenticated and the past left alone. Isla cannot do both.

As marks on the parchment align with absences in the archive, she begins to uncover not a lost place but a deliberate erasure. Proving who drew the map may restore a community to history. It may also force the living to answer for a silence maintained across nine generations.

An atmospheric literary mystery about maps, inheritance, and what the living owe the deliberately forgotten.