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

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He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war. But MacLean's Bookseller of Inverness has the right whiff of nostalgia, tragedy, and post war devastation.

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. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The strength of the book is in the characterisation, especially of Iain but of all the other main characters too, and in the portrayal of the town and the historical setting.

I’d seen it was being published last August and added it to my TBR list, so I’m glad you enjoyed it. 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. 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. The initial plot itself is probably the weakest part of the book, although it’s just about strong enough to carry it. 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.

Anyone who has visited the place will know the atmosphere that envelops it to somehow cut away the intervening centuries. 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.

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. If you have ever wanted to go back in time to a dangerous yet captivating period of history, this is the book for you. I wonder if closer to the time of these events of Scottish history more books were written featuring characters who were on the winning side. An uneasy peace reigns in the Highlands now, enforced by the red-coated soldiers of the ruling Hanoverian King. Those dogs are, by seventeenth-century necessity, 'hounds', but I like to believe that in each of them beats the heart of a Labrador.