This Door of the Seas

This Door of the Seas is Darkland Tales #7 and Val McDermid’s second book in Polygon’s multi-author series, after Queen Macbeth (#5). Each volume revisits a separate episode from Scottish history, so the series can be read in any order. It is also the first book McDermid has co-written with Jo Sharp, the Geographer Royal for Scotland.

The novella returns to the failed Darien Scheme of the late 1690s, when Scotland tried to establish a trading colony called New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama. McDermid and Sharp tell the story through letters that expedition scientist Dr James Wallace writes to his wife Eliza and to Sir Robert Sibbald. The letter format places readers inside the expedition, with Wallace reporting events as they happen.

From internationally bestselling author Val McDermid and Geographer Royal of Scotland Jo Sharp, a heart-wrenching novella about an ill-fated colonial scheme that bankrupted a country and forever altered the trajectory of history

At the end of the seventeenth century, a brave group of Scots sail for a jungle-coastline on the other side of the world, the junction between North and South America. Their objective: to establish a trading colony that would assure their hard-strapped country’s future, as the East India Company had done for England. Their plan? To open a passage through Panama, a true “door of the seas and key to the universe.” Instead, what begins as a dream of prosperity quickly turns into a nightmare that bankrupts an already impoverished nation and propels it towards political union with England.

Written as a series of letters home from expedition scientist Dr. James Wallace to his wife Eliza and Sir Robert Sibbald, Scotland’s first Geographer Royal, This Door of the Seas offers a devastating account of the infamous Darien Scheme, the colonial misadventure that completely changed the history of Scotland.

A standalone Darkland Tales novella – see all Val McDermid books on the Val McDermid Books in Order page.