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. While reading the book, I did stop and brush up a bit on my Scottish history, the better to understand what was going on. I think I was expecting this to be a crime novel (confusing it with the recent Death of a Bookseller – do those publishers know that the word bookseller is like catnip to some of us? MacLean also incorporates some subplots that touch on wider topics such as the slave trade and indentured servitude.

It soon becomes clear that someone is seeking revenge against people who betrayed the Jacobite cause in the earlier rising, in 1715. He looks for a missing book of forbidden names bought as part of the book collection owned by the Old Fox, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, that appears to hold the answer as to why certain people are being found dead. Howver, the next morning, when Iain comes to open the door, he finds the stranger dead, his throat cut and a sword lying beside the body. From then on, the story gains pace as Iain puts himself into danger seeking out a missing book which may name those of his contemporaries who are traitors to the cause. 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.

As the story unfolds , the book explains the various intrigues and connections surrounding the Jacobite cause across the years. 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. I did read Alexander Seaton a few years ago, and although I don’t really remember much about the story now, I know I enjoyed it at the time.

But I will try not to do it again, though disappearing for a while seems to be becoming a (bad) habit!I didn't enjoy this quite so much as MacLean's Civil War sequence, simply because I never fell in love with the Stewarts, even as a child. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I could have due to it feeling weighed-down with too much description. 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. In general, The Bookseller of Inverness is historical fiction at its best, and I would recommend it to all fans of the genre. Very much enjoyed the character of Donald Mòr the grumpy book binder who speaks almost exclusively in Gaelic and has time for nobody but a soft spot for the young Tormod.

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. In this sense, it reminded me rather of DK Broster’s wonderful The Flight of the Heron trilogy, also seen from the Jacobite side but which also recognises that there were honourable people on the Hanoverian side.I’d have given it five stars but I found it too complicated - but that may be my fault as an American ill-versed in Scottish history. 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. The dog is much more conducive to this kind of thing than the children, although I have realised that a close reading of my books reveals the true hero of most of them to be a canine.