Verity Miller doesn’t set out to be a private investigation agent. She’s happy working as a chemist for the War Office, designing detonators for shells and bombs. Then, on 31st January 1919, her life changes. At a demonstration in George Square, Glasgow, supporting Clydeside shipyard workers’ demands for a 40 hour week, she intervenes to stop two police officers assaulting an old woman. She is immediately arrested and charged with breach of the peace, then later fined. That sets off a chain of events which gains an unstoppable momentum as the weeks and months pass.

A friend from the Glasgow Rent Strikes in 1915 had gone missing, and her ex-husband is found dead. Verity accepts the challenge to find her friend before it was too late.

The Verity Miller novels are set between her home town of North Berwick, itself struggling to recover its pre-war tourist glory, and Glasgow, in the grip of strikes, riots, and a housing crisis all the while facing the scourge of poverty and rapidly increasing unemployment.

Verity is ably assisted by her “adopted” sister Connie, and her aunts, Hattie and Lydia, the former a shrewd business owner, the latter a retired Headteacher. She secures the support, and then the friendship of Inspector Fergus McCurdy, like Verity, disillusioned by the Great War and his part in it and plagued by nightmares and anxieties. Fergus’s twin sister Freya, an aspiring psychiatrist, has her own demons, and a chronic fear of making mistakes, mistakes which may have fatal consequences.