The Dancing Horse

Donald Grant, a flame-haired young sports journalist with a bright future ahead of him, lives and works in London. Yet he remains every inch a Scot… 

So, when his boss and fellow Scotsman, irascible News Editor ‘Bulldog’ McPhail, diverts him from the sports pages and asks him to investigate the murder of an apparent ‘down and out’ in Soho, Donald relishes a trip back to his childhood home. 

For McPhail senses that the roots of the murder, and thus their story, lie not in London, but in Kintyre. 

And so the two men travel north from London to Scotland.

But they are not the only ones making that journey…

Almost as soon as Donald and Bulldog set foot in Scotland, strange things start to happen. Coincidences, surely? 

For who knows, or cares, where they are?

One young lady from London does, it seems…

Soon, the two men begin to build a picture of the local community, and in particular, the events surrounding the atomic centre recently built there.

Could this be the key to the Soho murder?

For on the surface, the area in which they find themselves seems quiet, old-fashioned, at times even genteel – Lady Mary Kennedy, for example, seems particularly keen to proffer hospitality.

But is this secluded part of Scotland all that it seems? Or is the extreme secrecy that surrounds the atomic centre hiding a dangerous, even murderous, secret?

When the corpse of one of its scientists is found hanging, suspicions about the atomic centre are raised even further. 
But is the source of evil really there, or somewhere much less obvious?

The Dancing Horse is a fast-paced, rip-roaring murder mystery in the classic British style, that combines a gripping story line with highly memorable characters and frequent dashes of humour. 

‘Angus MacVicar runs John Buchan close as the supreme spinner of an enthralling yarn’ - Daily Express 

‘The writer par excellence of Scottish thrillers’ - Western Independent 

‘The finest exponent of the thick-ear thriller since the palmy days of ‘Sapper’ and John Buchan.’ - Time and Tide 

Angus MacVicar was a Scottish writer specialising in crime thrillers, young adult and autobiography. His other books include The Singing Spider, The Ten Green Brothers and Crime's Masquerader.