Anyone with an eye to the news will know that planning around it or the naming of places related to the ’45 rising remain live issues. Like you I have bought a copy of some of the Seeker series after meeting the author in Inverness several years ago. 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. I have to admit, if I wasn’t a massive fan of Maclean’s Seeker novels, I probably wouldn’t have persevered.

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. The plot is driven by character, and the conflicts and drives of the characters are driven by their world, language and experiences.Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. Intermittently, I had been working on a non-crime, nineteenth-century novel based around the Black Isle, very close to where I live. Six years later in 1752, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a very different and quiet life, he is no longer the outgoing man he used to be, and is working as a bookseller in Inverness, with his assistant Richard Dempster, and the talented bookbinder, Donald Mor. After an introductory note setting the scene for the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the novel opens with two prologues.

I’m not sure – I have read a couple of books written closer to the time, and yes, now that you mention it I think they do give a rather more balanced picture.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. Excellent historical fiction dealing with Bonnie Prince Charlie's attempts to retake the throne in 1745 and its years-long aftermath.

It is where Iain MacGillivray is left for dead on Drumossie Moor, next to the dead body of his beloved cousin, Laclan. I used my new time machine to travel back to the Chicago World Fair in 1893, and then it broke down.I've never been to Inverness but this book was so well written I felt I could picture it really vividly. 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. I haven’t read any of those books (although I do own The Redemption of Alexander Seaton), but when I saw that her new novel, The Bookseller of Inverness, was a standalone, it seemed like a good place to start.