The Wild Island

About this book

This new novel features Jemima Shore the delightful heroine of Antonia Frasers highly praised first mystery Quiet as a Nun. Here Jemima Shore investigator and TV personality arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday. The sun is shining. Paradise she thinks. But at that moment she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral." So begins an adventure far removed from Jemimas visions of heather-covered hills crystal-clear streams romantic men in kilts fairy-tale castles....Instead she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions its jealousies and its violence in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting is the Wild Island itself sometimes enchanting but too often frighteningly remote; the streams not silvery but brown and sinister; her holiday home with its disturbing sometimes terrifying influences; the people--the dashing war hero Colonel Henry and his sons the forthright old priest Father Flanagan Bridie the family servant Clementina the wayward heiress...none of them quite what they seem. And then there is the specter of the Scottish "freedom fighters " in the shape of the self-styled army of the Red Rose. It all adds up to a brilliantly told story of mystery and intrigue on the Wild Island. This new novel features Jemima Shore the delightful heroine of Antonia Frasers highly praised first mystery Quiet as a Nun. Here Jemima Shore investigator and TV personality arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday. The sun is shining. Paradise she thinks. But at that moment she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral." So begins an adventure far removed from Jemimas visions of heather-covered hills crystal-clear streams romantic men in kilts fairy-tale castles....Instead she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions its jealousies and its violence in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting is the Wild Island itself sometimes enchanting but too often frighteningly remote; the streams not silvery but brown and sinister; her holiday home with its disturbing sometimes terrifying influences; the people--the dashing war hero Colonel Henry and his sons the forthright old priest Father Flanagan Bridie the family servant Clementina the wayward heiress...none of them quite what they seem. And then there is the specter of the Scottish "freedom fighters " in the shape of the self-styled army of the Red Rose. It all adds up to a brilliantly told story of mystery and intrigue on the Wild Island.