Hazardous Spirits

Evelyn Hazard is a middle-class wife in 1920s Edinburgh, and her days follow the course she was raised to expect. Her husband Robert upsets that calm with a claim that leaves her stunned: he can speak with the dead. The couple soon find themselves drawn into the spiritualist scene, a hidden world of ritual and sorcery that took shape in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic and the First World War.

As Robert's abilities become the center of their lives, Evelyn's carefully ordered world begins to come apart. Old secrets from her past threaten to surface, putting at risk everything she cares about. She is forced to ask whether the man she loves is a charlatan, a lunatic, or, most unsettling of all, someone who genuinely hears the departed.

The story unfolds in twentieth-century Scotland, rendered with a sharp eye for period detail and a sly, understated sense of humor. It follows a young woman working out her place in a changing society, and her shifting bond with a husband she believed she knew.