Jacobite betrayals & revenge!

 

• The Bookseller of Inverness: S.G. MacLean

• Narrator: David Monteath

Having briefly been a bookseller myself, made the acquaintance of a Jacobite historian & re-enactor in Edinburgh, and stayed in Inverness on several occasions, was drawn to this title. It's my first book by the historical crime writer S.G. MacLean, who as the authors note at the book's end confirms, really did do her research well.

The Bookseller of Inverness, is set six years after the final crushing defeat of the Forty-five Rebellion at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The aftermath saw the clan chiefs routed, and an uneasy peace hanging over the Highlands, enforced by the English Redcoats, soldiers of Hanoverian King George II. The playing of pipes, the wearing of tartan, the carrying of weapons were all banned yet Jacobite hopes still simmered, and those loyal to the cause constantly awaited word of another rising from Continent where the Young Pretender aka Bonnie Prince Charlie & his father lived in exile.
Jacobite Highlander, Iain MacGillivray, baring the scars of Drumossie Moor, now makes a quiet living as the bookseller of Inverness. Then one morning he discovers a stranger, murdered in the bookshop, the hilt of the dagger that killed him, tied with the symbolic white ribbon, a cockade. Soon after his father, dashing Hector appears; part of the Stuart court abroad, a skulker, a spy; he's a man who any redcoat will arrest on sight and he's back in Inverness to uncover an informer, code name Pickle, who's set to expose the latest Jacobite plot to reclaim the throne. This along with the discovery of the six old Jacobite traitors named in encrypted Book of Forbidden Names, sets in motion this absorbing tale of old & new betrayals and acts of revenge.
There's an interesting array of characters, good and bad on both sides, and Morag, a psychotic cat. The castles & Highlands are evocatively described - felt like I was back at the Falls of Foyers, Loch Ness, Urquhart Castle; and narrator David Monteath was his usual splendid self