The St Andrews
Exception.

People are not clocks. When a student’s laundry starts behaving like one, Hamish MacNair looks twice.

At twenty-three, Hamish is very good at patterns and considerably less good at people. His spectacles are held together with electrical tape. His tea is going cold. Fiona Bell is trying to persuade him to go to the cinema.

Then an ordinary university laundry app reveals something it should never have known: the movements of a student whose protection officers are rather keen on keeping those movements private.

Hamish follows the anomaly. Someone follows Hamish. Before long, a basement washing machine, a grey estate car and his parents’ hardware shop have become parts of a problem that cannot be solved from behind a laptop.

As the trail stretches beyond St Andrews, a detective called Harriet Keel starts asking the right questions. Fiona, meanwhile, would quite like him to turn up for their date alive. Preferably on time.

With sea air, royal complications and a family who regard tea as an operational necessity, The St Andrews Exception is a lighter mystery about a brilliant young man learning that the people behind the data matter—and that holding someone’s hand is occasionally deliberate.

A prequel to Two Shadows. The beginning of Harriet and Hamish’s partnership.