Love and murder in Elizabethan Edinburgh

Fate & Fortune is mostly set around the High Street area of Edinburgh in 1581 – the Elizabethan period – and follows on Shirley's first book Hue & Cry, which was set in St Andrews and published in June 2009.

"I'm really quite interested in how people lived in Scotland at that time because it's a period that people don't know a huge amount about," Shirley says.

"You had ordinary domestic life and people living their lives and coping with the tensions and constraints of the law and the church after the Reformation."

Fate & Fortune's main character is Hew Cullan, a young law student who moves to Edinburgh to finish his legal training, and ends up falling in love and solving a murder.

Shirley, who grew up in Newbattle near Dalkeith, says: "Hew is an ambivalent sort of character and he isn't sure if he wants to go into law. He really rebelled against the fact that there was no justice in the legal system at that time.

"There is also a murder and an abduction – a child goes missing – and Hew realises that the solution to it is much closer to home."

Shirley, who was born in Tynemouth and now lives in Crail, Fife, was shortlisted for the 2002 Debut Dagger by The Crime Writers' Association for The King's Desire, which eventually became the first Hew Cullan Mystery, Hue & Cry.

Shirley's third book is due to be published next year.