title: Transits of Terror
author: McManus, Alan
description: In what should be the happiest time of his life – teaching at a good school, with great friends, a lovely lover and a child to raise jointly on the way – Bruno Benedetti stands weeping on a bridge over the motorway that passes through Glasgow's Charing Cross. Under the midnight rain, poised between truth and lies, Bruno is overwhelmed by the fear that the person he was most sure of has been deceiving him for years. This despair drowns out his persistent sense that something is deeply wrong even though he's been asked, by sympathetic police officers, not to ignore his psychic gifts and to report any of his 'hunches' – no matter how foolish they seem to him. Even Pride Carnival in Edinburgh, that's usually an occasion of joy, leaves him blank and finally alone.
  But life has to go on, even when Bruno's rising anxiety means he's missing time over the months and waking up in strange places, unaware how he got there. Isolated, heartbroken and afraid, he tries to divert his obsessive mind by casting astrological transits to the natal chart as a gift for the child's first birthday. All seems well until he notices that the same celestial clock, auguring good fortune for the child, is a ticking time bomb for a local landmark Art Deco cinema, 'The Astra'.
  Feeling a fool, caught between hope and despair, as the police prove him wrong yet he is certain that international dignitaries are choosing to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, Bruno can't trust his instincts which have been so wrong for so long. As the clock counts down to terror, how can Bruno counter the malefic influence of the stars?
  ‘Transits of Terror’ is the sixth of the Bruno Benedetti Mysteries, which start with ‘Tricks of the Mind’ and continue with ‘The Lovers’, ‘Shades of the Sun’, ‘Qismet’ and ‘Tìr nam Bàn’.