Set in Mary King's Close, an exciting historical adventure featuring a young boy - Tom Afflick who finds himself transported from Edinburgh in 2012 and apprenticed to a plague doctor in Edinburgh in 1645. Young Tom Afflick has never felt so alone. His parents have split up and his mother has relocated him, hundreds of miles away from his home in Manchester to the unfamiliar city of Edinburgh. At his new school, Tom is simply known as 'The Manc' - a blow-in, an outsider. On a routine school trip to the historic site of Mary King's Close, Tom follows the ghostly figure of a young girl - only to find himself transported back in time to 1645, the year of the Edinburgh plague. Apprenticed against his will to a violent plague doctor, Tom needs to use all of his modern-day skills in order to survive, while he desperately searches for a way back to his own time. This children's historical novel is a departure for Philip Caveney - acclaimed author of the Sebastian Darke thrillers for children and the Alec Devlin mysteries - and is sure to be a hit with them.

After his nightmarish adventures in Mary King's Close in Crow Boy, Tom Afflick is drawn back to Edinburgh. At the National Museum of Scotland, he sees the eight tiny coffins that were discovered on Arthur's Seat in 1836 - one of the city's most intriguing mysteries. After a violent confrontation with his stepfather, Tom finds himself spinning back in time again, to the year 1828, where the peril comes not from bubonic plague but from a series of unexplained disappearances. Lost and confused, Tom seeks refuge in Tanner's Close as the guest of two of the city's most infamous inhabitants - But even two hundred years after the events of Crow Boy, he cannot escape the vengeful pursuit of bogus plague doctor, William McSweeny. Tom is soon caught up in a desperate struggle for survival - and the mystery of the tiny coffins is finally solved.

When Tom Afflick heads back to Edinburgh to stay with his mother and her partner, Hamish, he begins to think that he has finally come to terms with the breakup of his parent's marriage - but a sudden accident on a country road sends him tumbling once more, headlong into the past. This time, the book he is reading serves as the catalyst for his adventure. The book is Treasure Island. In 1881, Tom meets Robert Louis Stevenson, a sickly young author who has just published the story as a weekly serial in a children's magazine. Can Tom persuade him to try and publish the book as a novel or will one of the world's greatest adventures be lost forever? And is Tom going to prove to be the inspiration for some of Stevenson's best-known adventures? One ally in Tom's quest is Catriona McCallum, the young girl he last met in 1828, now an elderly woman and an author herself. But Tom's deadly adversary, The Plague Doctor, has once again followed him through time, and is intent on taking his revenge. As events spiral out of control, Tom realises that this is destined to be the deadliest adventure of them all ...one that he may not even survive.