The town
Kinloch
Population ~18,000. A former fishing and light-manufacturing economy hollowed out in the 1980s–90s — a tourist veneer of boutique hotels beside boarded-up pubs, over deep economic anxiety.
The World
Kinloch
A fictionalised Highland community on a coast that has spent thirty-seven years not talking about one night in October.
Places
The geography of the series
The loch is the physical and psychological centre of The Hollow Coast. Everything else arranges itself around it.
The centre
The Loch
The vast loch shore at the physical and psychological centre of The Hollow Coast. Isolation, old money, and Highland community silence.
District
The Old Quarter
Old fishing families and generational silence. The town's memory lives here — and so does its refusal to speak.
District
The Marina
Money, newcomers, and secrets with lawyers.
District
The Flats
Council estates, poverty, loyalty — the people the institutions forget.
Geography
Kinloch Coast
A fictionalised stretch of Scottish Highland coastline on the eastern shore of the loch — lochside villages, isolated lighthouse communities, and the ruins of a Victorian asylum on the headland.
Institution
The Caerwyn Herald
The local newspaper — one semi-honest journalist and an editor on the take.
Institution
Caerwyn CID
Understaffed, underfunded, and haunted by the 1987 Taken disappearance.
The city
Inverdrum
The nearest city — large enough to have organised crime, a university, a corrupt council, and a newspaper that has been bought and sold three times in twenty years.
The 1987 Case
What is known
Five boys went out to the coast near Kinloch in October 1987. One was recovered. Four were never found.
Nothing beyond the publicly established facts of the case is shown here. Case detail unlocks as you read, and later-book material is never displayed to a reader who has not reached it.
Timeline
Thirty-seven years
1987
The Taken
In October, five boys aged 10–14 vanish from the coast near Kinloch over a single weekend. One body is recovered. Four are never found. The official verdict: accidental drowning. No charges.
1987
The case is closed
The senior detective who closed the case retires six months later with a new house and no mortgage. The boys' families are silenced, bought off, or destroyed.
1994
A threat to go public
Someone who knew what happened in 1987 threatens to break the silence. The threat is contained.
2004
The buried review
DCI Noah Cassel of the Met's cold case unit reviews The Taken file. Six weeks later he is transferred out of cold cases. The review is never spoken of again.
2024
The coast surfaces again
A body surfaces in Kinloch harbour — a woman in her fifties, hands bound with fishing twine. In her jacket: a photograph of five boys, circa 1987, their faces circled in red ink.
2024
The notebooks
A Kinloch fisherman is found dead in his own nets, staged to look like an accident. His notebooks — thirty years of careful observations about the 1987 cover-up — pass to his son.
2025
The network stirs
A politician's death in a locked hotel room, a wrongful prosecution, and a town beginning to understand that the people who buried 1987 are still here — and still protected.
2026
The reckoning
Thirty-seven years of accumulated evidence converge on the last surviving member of the network. The series ends where it began: on the coast, with the truth.
The timeline expands as books are published. Entries held for the series bible are marked and carry no invented detail.