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It is set in the years following Culloden as the surviving Jacobites try to go on with lives shattered by war, betrayal, and the occupation of their country. His father, whom he has not seen for years, a close confidante of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Teàrlach Eideard in Scots Gaelic) appears in Inverness. She also incorporates some subplots that touch on wider topics such as the slave trade and indentured servitude. Das Buch hätte sehr viel Potenzial, aber es war mir zu abgehackt, zu viele Sprünge, zu viele Dinge, die ich nicht verstand (ein Glossar wäre hilfreich gewesen), die Charaktere waren nicht wirklich sympatisch, die Reaktionen nicht logisch. The Scottish author SG MacLean is best known for her Seeker series and before that, the Alexander Seaton series originally published under the name Shona MacLean.
The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.My main character – Iain MacGillivray – is a bookseller trying to find some way forward in his life after the devastation wrought in it by the ’45 Jacobite rising in which he had taken part. Oddly, despite this, I had a good idea of who both the avenger and the last victim were going to be, and I put this down to the fact that there weren’t enough credible possibilities.
Even with my relative boredom with the Jacobite era, I felt much more at home there than amongst Cromwell’s cronies! The Highlanders of the past, the ghosts of Culloden, had been real, flesh and blood characters with cares and intrigues and sorrows and laughter of their own. If you have ever wanted to go back in time to a dangerous yet captivating period of history, this is the book for you.This was an amazing historical fiction that captivated me right from the start and was a superb well paced tale that also managed to keep me wanting to know more. This incident starts a series of events connected to Iain’s turbulent past and the political situation in contemporary Scotland. The highlight for me were the stellar characters the author created, such as Ian, his grandmother, Mairi and the Grandes Dames, Hector, Donald, Ishbel MacLeod, the confectioner, and young Tormod, who effortlessly steals the show. I really enjoyed this standalone book and discovered a lot about the post Culloden history of the area, and thought it was filled with excellent characters – especailly the Grande Dames! MacLean also incorporates some subplots that touch on wider topics such as the slave trade and indentured servitude.
Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness.Come the summer of 2020 however, conversations with my editor and others suggested that such an uncertain time was really not the right one to make such a significant shift of period or genre. To this end, Hector MacGillivray plies back and forth between Scotland and France where the Jacobite King-in-waiting (Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie) resides in exile.
She takes the Jacobite side, as is de rigueur in modern Scotland – a bit like the Spanish Civil War, this period of history has been written mostly by the losers, and we all now like to pretend we’d have been Jacobites for the romance of it, however ahistorical that might be. However, there’s a secondary plot which grows in importance as the book wears on, and this is much more successful, involving a possible new uprising and the fear that a traitor is still at work. MacLean mentions in her notes that it was around this time that black people began to be mentioned in Scotland’s historical records, as Highlanders’ initially enforced connections with the slave-owning colonies were formed.Yes, the Jacobites get a bit wearing after a while, but I enjoyed this one more than her Seeker series which is set in Cromwell’s England, and for some reason just didn’t work for me at all. The first and third books in the series, The Seeker and Destroying Angel , have won the CWA Historical Dagger and the second and fourth, The Black Friar and The House of Lamentations were longlisted for the same award. And any World’s Fair is a great choice for time travel – personally I think I’d go for the Great Exhibition though. Like you I have bought a copy of some of the Seeker series after meeting the author in Inverness several years ago. and it’s tough starting again with a new cast, but I have to judge this novel on its merits, of which there are many, especially the depth of characterisation, historical detail and Literature quality of prose.
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