Captain Hal Stirling is flown to England from Afghanistan after a roadside bomb renders him battered and broken. Once home, he retreats to his ancestral family seat of Stirling Towers - a gothic mansion that dominates the landscape near the remote Scottish Borders - for a Christmas of quiet recuperation. But on arrival he discovers that his mother, a fanatical spiritualist, has died and been hastily buried. Isolated from the insular local community,...