People go missing. People go missing all the time. In most cases, they are found again quickly. But some disappear.

Most of the disappeared are people who chose to disappear; people who walked out of ther lives. I suspect most of us, at some point or other, have faced that temptation: the open door, the road ahead, the train journey or the plane flight: a chance not only to leave a life behind but also the opportunity to become someone else entirely.

Most of those who disappear fall into this category. Then there are the tragic cases, the people abducted, kidnapped and killed. Many of these are found, eventually, their remains allowing a measure of closure to those that mourn them.

But there are other disappearances. Disappearances that stud the tales and folklore particularly of the ocean swept shores of northern Europe. In these stories, people walk out of this world, wittingly or not, into another realm that runs somehow parallel and somehow perpendicular to our own.

Otherworld, the land under the waves, the land of the living, Faerie, Avalon; these are just some of its names and, according to these tales, some of the people who disappear do so because they find the door to this otherworld.

The Mysteries is about people who disappear – and the people who search for them. It’s a story of loss and finding, weaving a detective story into a fairy tale and a fairy tale into a detective story. It switches from Turnpike Lane (an area of London which, I can attest, is about as far from Faerie as it’s possible to get) to the shores of Loch Sween in Scotland, which I can also confirm lies on the border between this world and… somewhere else.

It’s a story of losing and finding, and the perils that come with both. If you have ever walked down a suburban street at night when no one else is moving and the light pools around the street lamps and it becomes clear that it would be all too easy to turn onto a street in a different city entirely; if you have ever walked lost in mist on a hillside to suddenly find a stone standing in front of you, cold dripping from its face, then this is a book for you.