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A staunch Jacobite, Mairi was known in Inverness as one of the Grande Dames, three elderly women and inveterate Jacobite rebels, who seemed to know everything that was going on in their town. She hasn’t ruled out another book set in the Highlands, but reckons she would set it three decades on from Culloden, around the time of the French Revolution. 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. Now, the book has barely got started at this point, so you can imagine the thrills and spills to come!
After an introductory note setting the scene for the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the novel opens with two prologues. His grandmother Mairi Farquharson brought him up when his mother ran away to France when he was a child and he still lived in her house. Places seem to retain a lot of the spirit of what happened, who lived there, you can’t shake it off. 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.
The use of Gaelic in conversation and in names was an authentic touch as it would have been (and still is) in common usage in the Highlands and indeed is on the rise across Scotland - a current learner right here. Now, she’s come full circle, living in Conon Bridge, in a house she used to spot from the bus every day when she went to school. She felt it wasn’t a good time to shift genres, because it was going to be quite a different book, so she asked me if I had anything else,” Shona said.
As I did so, I found myself inevitably drawn to places where my father had grown up or had first taken me to – the areas around Daviot and Dunlichity in Strathnairn, Clava Cairns and of course, Culloden itself. Even though history tells us that there were no more rebellions after 1745, we will the Elibank plot to be successful and the Highlanders freed from the oppression of the Hanoverians. As it was I was aware who was the murderer very early on and who the penultimate target would be, so I'd say read this one as a historical rather than as a murder mystery.
gripping historical thriller set in Inverness in the wake of the 1746 battle of Culloden from twice CWA award-winning author S. The novel explores the impact of the Jacobite rebellions upon three different generations of highlander families, as well as, provides a tightly plotted adventurous mystery. 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. Still traumatised by the death of his cousin Lachlan, Iain has been living quietly since the failed rising, selling books and running a small public library in Inverness. In their cafe in the gallery upstairs, they had little cards saying that Leakey’s was on the site of the old Gaelic church in Inverness where Jacobite soldiers, Jacobite prisoners, had been kept after Culloden, kept in dreadful conditions and then some of them were taken outside and shot in the Old High kirkyard.
They came to life in my mind, and, fictionalised in the pages of my book, took their place for me once again in the town where they, and I, had been born.The murder coincides with the reappearance of Iain’s father Hector, a prominent Jacobite who fled Scotland years earlier but still hasn’t given up hope of seeing a Stuart king on the throne once more. And I think I wanted more of the bookseller and less of the conspiracy which is idiotic of me, because that's another book. Leakey’s was said to be haunted by their ghosts, and I couldn’t quite shake off the idea that maybe the spirit of the Jacobites were retained there.
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.
Our features are original articles from our print magazines (these will say where they were originally published) or original articles commissioned for this site. 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. We thrill at Iain MacGillivray’s re-engagement with life, so brilliantly captured in the scene, late in the book, where he ‘flytes’ joyously with another Highland fiddler in a Jacobite stronghold. I enjoyed reading descriptions of the surrounding countryside, where I have family connections, and there is an increasing air of tension as old resentments surface and revenge is enacted. Culloden, and its aftermath are very much part of the Highland consciousness, and for me, to embark on a novel around them was to go where angels fear to tread.
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