There were many ideas in A Very Private Haunting written by Sharon Bidwell and I enjoyed reading and wanting to find out how the strands of story all come together. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart begins the story, from an encounter with an alien presence in a hospital and then he is on leave, only to get the call from the son of an old friend who needs his help. That takes him to Scotland. Ann Travers travels with the Brig. The friend’s son, Arthur, was a good character and I was able to empathize with him. He has gone to Scotland to check out a house that had been passed down to him, that he doesn’t want to take responsibility for. I think the writer set up his character and his story well. I liked the other characters too, like Duncan and Tomas. I loved that part of the story, where the teenagers Duncan and Scott and Saundra and Aileen, begun to question their parents and what part they might have had in their friend Tomas’s disappearance, and how that follows a pattern. I was not expecting what happened in the end to Tomas. We got his perspective and I thought he would be fine.

A Very Private Haunting was creepy and gripping. The first-hand perspectives did swing from one character to another, which worked I think with the narration of the story as a whole. It was great too, to be back with Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT.