March 2025

Just published last month is Alexander’s latest book in the Perfect Passion Company series set in Edinburgh’s charming New Town. Looking for You follows on from the first book in which our protagonist Katie takes over the running of this matchmaking bureau with the help of her stylish neighbour William.

Looking for You

The lecture was due to begin at six in the evening and already, by five-thirty, the first few rows of the lecture theatre in George Square were filling up with two separate tribes: students—chattering, voluble—and members of the general public—quiet, with that certain sobriety that marked an Edinburgh audience. A few years earlier, Katie would have identified herself with the students; now, at the age of thirty, she accepted that she had become a member of the public, and that the decade or so that separated her from the students in the room was an increasingly significant gap.

Not that she minded too much. We all had to grow up, she reminded herself, and there were plenty of consolations that came with getting a bit older. Not having to share a flat, for instance, was something that only came in your late twenties, if then, and was something that she had particularly welcomed when she returned to Edinburgh. Throughout the years she had spent in London she had been in shared accommodation, often with people whom she might not have chosen as flatmates—had she been given the opportunity to pick and choose.

Helen, for example, with whom she had shared just before she came back to Scotland, had an irritating way of chewing her food to which Katie had never become reconciled. She did not exactly eat with her mouth open, but it was close enough, and Katie had found herself watching with reluctant fascination the mastication of the buttered toast that her flatmate so enjoyed eating. Then there was Julie, who had emerged from a crumbling manor house in an obscure English shire—Northamptonshire, Katie thought, or was it Rutland?—and who had a braying laugh with which Katie had never been able to come to terms. She was markedly vacuous, Katie decided, being principally interested in finding a man who would spirit her back to the countryside and install her in a house with a garden large enough to accommodate a duck pond. “I just love ducks,” she had confessed to Katie. “They are such intelligent creatures. I just adore them.”

Katie had expressed the view that ducks were not intelligent at all—at least in her experience—and that whilst they made good eating, they were less than stimulating company. This had brought a shocked reaction from Julie, who said that she pitied anybody who could not see the sheer character of ducks, and that eating them showed scant regard for the feelings of sensitive and sympathetic fellow creatures. Katie, in fact, although not formally vegetarian, generally ate little meat, and very rarely, if ever, had duck. Her reaction to Julie’s enthusing over ducks was provoked out of impatience with the other young woman’s gushing enthusiasm, and the conversation went no further. But she was relieved when a not-very-bright young man called Roland began to visit the flat. His intention was to lure Julie off to a hamlet in Gloucestershire, where he had a converted farmhouse with four acres of land, quite enough, Katie believed, for not one but several duck ponds. Roland was employed in his father’s estate agency and spoke in the language of that calling. Views were always sought-after, houses always had character, and neighbourhoods were always up-and- coming.

He was a keen member of a clay-pigeon shooting club—clubs were always, in his view, exclusive—and was, Katie thought, an ideal partner for Julie. But then she felt guilty: she had been too dismissive, even to the point of lacking charity. Julie had her good points, and no doubt Roland had his too. She should not condescend to them just because she found them dull.

Sharing, though, came to an end when Katie left her job at the London gallery in which she had been employed, and returned to Edinburgh, where she had been born and brought up, to run the business of a relative who had taken an adult gap year in Canada. Her father’s cousin, Ness, was a woman in her early fifties, a lively and entertaining devotee of Greek mythology and Jungian psychology, who had decided that time was passing rather quickly and that if she did not travel now, she never would. Her business was an unusual one—an introductions agency, or marriage bureau, as she sometimes described it, called the Perfect Passion Company.

“There are very few of us left,” Ness explained to Katie.

“There used to be rather a lot of marriage bureaus, but now we are rarae aves, as they say—rare birds for the non-Latinate.

There are one or two still soldiering on in London, but we are the only one in Edinburgh, indeed all Scotland, I believe. In other words, Katie, we are it.”

Katie was not sure that she wanted or was qualified to be it, but Ness had been sanguine. “You’ll cope wonderfully,” she assured her. “All you have to do is to introduce the right man to the right woman, and vice versa. Then let nature take its course. Simple.”

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Looking for You is available in the UK from Polygon.