COME IN FROM THE COLD

Charlotte Milne spent her childhood in the Scottish Borders and considers herself Scottish although she lives near Southampton in order to be reasonably useful to her children and seven grandchildren. She and her husband now spend several months a year at their cottage in Wester Ross in Scotland. She trained as a secretary but though her typing speed is excellent, it still takes some years to produce a book. Her career included work with the National Trust for Scotland, two years in Uganda as Assistant to the Dean of Makerere University and Personnel Manager (now called Human Resources....) at Leasco in London, in the early days of computers when they took up an entire room. The rest was as wife, mother, grandmother, gardener, chauffeur, chief bottle washer, etc.

Wartime love and murder throw a long shadow.Annie Devereux, humiliated and bruised by her divorce, retreats to David Mackenzie's cottage in the Scottish Highlands to research the mysterious wartime history of her grandfather, serving on the Arctic convoys supplying Russia in World War 2.
In 1942 John Elliott comes off convoy a sick man and is billeted on nineteen-year-old Mhairi to recuperate. But Mhairi's relationship with a dangerous and manipulative black marketeer brings trouble and death. Fingers of fear and uncertainty reach into the future.
David, grieving his dead wife and seemingly unable to move on with either life or relationships, is intrigued by Annie's discovery of a connection between his grandmother and Annie's grandfather. As Annie and David begin to peel away the hidden memories of ninety-year-old Mhairi, dark secrets surface - a doomed wartime love and a death which still affects the living.
Soon Annie has a secret of her own but concealing it was the worst decision she ever made. Both Annie and David must find a path to healing and reconciliation before they can come in from the cold.