The Ogham Plank

"The Ogham Plank" a romantic mystery set in modern-day Scotland. It follows David MacDougall and Carina Brodie, who find themselves thrown together on a dangerous and perplexing quest. Mystifying Celtic symbols and an ancient document are the keys to a journey that will plunge them into a world of intrigue, betrayal, and murder before the full meaning of "the Ogham Plank" is finally revealed.

David is a university professor who is stalled in a stagnant career and suffering from a painful break-up. Having nothing better to do during the summer, he finds himself in Scotland on a car ferry crossing from Oban to the Isle of Mull. He is his way to collect an inheritance left to him by a great-uncle he barely knew. Aboard the ferry he meets Carina, a strikingly beautiful young woman, who has been volunteering at an archaeological dig site in the Scottish Highlands. The two strike up a conversation and David is immediately smitten. However, once the ferry docks they have to go their separate ways.

David finds accommodations where he meets the hostess Beileag and her precocious 16-year-old daughter Morag. The teenager is obsessed with finding a lost treasure rumored to be in a Spanish galleon that sank hundreds of years ago in the Tobermory harbor. Later, much to his disappointment, David discovers that his "inheritance" turns out to be boxes of worthless junk and an apparently useless wooden plank that is covered with a series of strange markings.

David soon encounters Carina who is now free of her volunteer work and off exploring the island. Carina finds the wooden plank and informs David that the strange markings are actually an ancient Irish language known as Ogham. They learn that there is an elderly recluse on the island named Padraig who is knowledgeable in Celtic culture and the Gaelic language. Eventually he is able to translate the Ogham writing, which leads the three of them on a perilous quest to discover a secret that has been hidden for more than five hundred years. - a secret so valuable that there are those willing to kill to possess it.