Angus Books in Order

The Angus books are a small linked pair of dark timeslip novels set in Scotland rather than Rome. They were written, and are set, in the 1980s, and they lean into old stories, local landscape, and the uneasy feeling that the past is not finished with the present.

Angus matters here in a very literal way. Fields, standing stones, digs, woods, and weather are not just scenery, they are part of the machinery that makes the stories work. Wishart uses his home county as a place where ordinary modern teenagers can brush up against something much older, stranger, and harder to explain.

Hexagon follows Robbie and Jacko Ogilvy and their cousin Kat Lindsay. The three are caught inside a tense emotional triangle that starts to mirror a tragedy from more than a thousand years earlier, until myth, magic, and present-day choices begin folding into each other. Jaeger's Howe centres on Ally Fraser, who is worn down by the same recurring dream night after night and is sent to help on an archaeological dig. There, the dream turns out to be tied to a real ancient burning, and the line between memory, legend, and lived experience starts to blur.

These are short books, but they do not play small.

What links them is mood as much as plot. Both stories use Celtic and Scandinavian mythology, both put young people under real pressure, and both treat the past as something active rather than decorative. The tension comes less from clue-solving than from dread, recognition, and the sense that the characters are being drawn into patterns laid down long before they were born.

They also feel darker than many books written with younger readers in mind. There is adventure here, but not the cosy sort. Wishart is interested in old violence, old loyalties, and the cost of stepping into a story that may already know how it wants to end.

If you like atmospheric British fantasy, archaeological mystery, or novels where landscape and legend carry as much weight as the characters, this is what the Angus books offer. Read them for the eerie mood, the mythic undertow, and the way modern life starts slipping sideways into something older and more dangerous.