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The Bookseller of Inverness: a gripping historical thriller from the double prizewinning author

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The Bookseller of Inverness is a gripping historical thriller set in Inverness in the wake of the 1746 battle of Culloden from twice CWA award-winning author S.

Like you I have bought a copy of some of the Seeker series after meeting the author in Inverness several years ago.A gripping historical thriller set in Inverness in the wake of the 1746 battle of Culloden from twice CWA award-winning author S. Anyone who has visited the place will know the atmosphere that envelops it to somehow cut away the intervening centuries. This incident starts a series of events connected to Iain’s turbulent past and the political situation in contemporary Scotland. 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. This is not, however, as romanticised as The Flight of the Heron – MacLean’s characters ring truer and this makes the book feel more modern, not in an anachronistic sense but in that they think and act as normal flawed humans, rather than as the impossibly virtuous Highlanders of Broster’s creation.

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. 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. The first book, The Killing Season, was published by Orion in 2014, followed by The Samaritan, The Time to Kill (titled Winterlong in the USA), and Don’t Look For Me. This is a difficult and complex period of British history and yet it evoked the post Culloden Inverness and its inhabitants so clearly that I became totally engrossed. The latter stages of the book take on aspects of the thriller, and again MacLean handles this very well.As I wrote the book, I could not shake off the consciousness of my father’s generation of native Highlanders whose lives had been blighted by having to go through a war of their own. Out’ for Charles Edward Stuart, Prince or Young Pretender depending which side is naming him, Iain was badly wounded in the battle that brought the 1745 Jacobite rebellion to its bloody end, but he was luckier than the many hundreds of men who perished during the battle or in the reprisals that followed it.

It’s the characters that make it, the historical overtones, the Scottish background and the idea of a bookseller with a mysterious book.

Her standalone Jacobite thriller, 'The Bookseller of Inverness' was voted Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2023. But this book didn't tell me a joined-up story, and I think my judgement of these things is mostly quite good. But I don’t think I’ve read a single one that is totally in favour of the Hanoverians – the winning side. The backdrop is a brilliantly portrayed insight into the aftermath of Culloden and the impact of defeat on the Highland Jacobites, full of stories of cruelty, courage and conflict.

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