By Jane Davis
Special to THE DAILY

If you are a Harry Potter fan, here’s an author to add to your list of favorites. Lisa Tuttle skillfully weaves together a tapestry of Celtic mythology, agricultural folklore and romance set on a peninsula in northernmost Scotland.

She presents a locked room mystery when the village of Appleton is cut off from the mainland by a massive rockslide and peoples it with three women representing various stages in the female life cycle.

One is a young American, Ashley Kaldis, who comes seeking answers to her grandmother’s past. All she knows is her grandmother fled on the eve of a festival where she had been chosen Apple Queen, and arrived in America taciturn about her previous life. As her bus wends its way along the narrow roadway only the day before the rockslide, she glimpses a handsome man who seems to know her already.

Nell Westray is newly widowed and has settled in a ramshackle manor house on the outskirts of the village where she throws her energies into restoring the gardens, especially the renowned local apple variety, which made the village famous only a few decades earlier. The decline in the crop began in the harvest following Ashley’s grandmother’s flight. She says little of the tragedy that brought her to this remote spot, preferring to limit her contacts with other people. One day she finds a strange man in her garden who insists on seeing her fruit trees.

Kathleen Mullaroy left her job in a large London library to take the post of head librarian in the village where the books are housed in a Victorian mansion complete with a forbidding tower and a resident apartment for the librarian. Trying to recover from a broken heart, she throws herself into the job-meeting the townspeople and learning the customs of the area and curating the odd collection of objects accumulated by the building’s architect. She, too, spies a stranger lurking outside the library as she closes one evening and shortly after that lights appear in the tower, which is inaccessible from below.

Then paintings turn up that have never been seen before, and portray an Appleton far different from the one she is learning to love.

Each chapter is prefaced with an article from a newspaper or journal or letter that is tied to the theme of those pages. This subtle transition lends another element of mystery to the story, often causing the reader to go back and consider how everything is related. Soon the mystery man’s identity is revealed and each woman has the chance to redeem the village from obscurity with startling consequences for everyone.

Tuttle’s previous book, “The Mysteries,” was also set in Scotland and introduced some of the folklore of that region where the thick mists and heather-covered hills make it easy to believe in fairy folk and enchantments. This is the land of “Brigadoon” — the village that appeared only once every 100 years, the land peopled by the same race that have leprechauns and banshees over in Ireland as well as the sinister Wicker Man. So, if you want to take a break from mundane tasks and spend some time with your imagination, you can’t go wrong with this gem.

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