Highland Crown by May McGoldrick is the first book in a Scottish historical series, and despite the absence of a time-travel element, it feels extremely Outlander-y.
The book features a doctor heroine, an outlaw hero, and both are on the run from a very bad English solider.
Sound familiar?
The book is a lot of fun and it’s got almost non-stop action that makes it easy to read in a single sitting. Unfortunately all that action and movement don’t give the main characters an awful lot of time to take a breath and get to know each other, so the development of their romance was a little stilted.
Also, the big reveal at the end had me kinda…
It’s eighty years after the Battle of Culloden, and things are still tense in Scotland. Isabella Drummond is a female surgeon, and she’s on the run. Her late husband, also a doctor, was secretly supporting the Scottish rebellion. English soldiers burst into their medical practice as they were treating people injured in a protest in Edinburgh, and Isabella’s husband was killed. She managed to escape, but only just barely.
The English, specifically Lt. Ellis Hudson, want Isabella as they believe that she can lead them to her late husband’s fellow rebels.
When the book opens, Isabella is making her way to Inverness and a man who can help her escape to Canada. She’s just arrived at the small village of Duff’s Head where a crotchety but lovable woman named Jean helps her hide for the night. Unfortunately things don’t go according to plan. That night a ship, The Highland Crown, runs aground on a reef and the captain, Cinaed Mackintosh, blows the ship up rather than risk its illegal cargo of weapons being confiscated. There’s a kerfuffle with the villagers which results in Cinaed being shot.
Jean wants Isabella to stay hidden so they can get to Inverness, but Isabella can’t ignore a person bleeding to death outside the cottage, so she drags Cinaed inside and saves his life.
This is all in the first few chapters, by the way. Like I said, this book has a lot of action.
There’s also a lot of plot and supporting characters, but the rest of the book is largely Isabella and Cinaed on the run from Hudson and the rest of the English militia, trying to get to Inverness, and once there find passage to Canada. They figure the best way to do this is to pose as a married couple. Of course, absolutely none of that goes according to plan, either.
There’s an extended stay at one of Cinaed’s relative’s homes in Inverness that involves fancy dinner parties and dressing up. There’s a prison break. There’s Cinaed’s family, who more or less abandoned him as a kid, but suddenly need to talk to him now. There’s fighting and sexytimes and arson and Jean bitching about the whole thing, which is pretty legit. Reading the book, I felt like everyone in it deserved an extended nap.
Like I said, it’s a lot of plot. And while Cinaed and Isabella spend most of their time together, that time is occupied by a lot of other things. They don’t have quiet spaces to really get to know each other, so the progression of their romance felt like it was based on attraction followed by a rapid arrival at, “Hey, we’re in love now.” Isabella’s last marriage was one of convenience so the recently dead husband doesn’t throw a wrench in anything. There really wasn’t any internal conflict to speak of–all of the tension was derived from the fact that Cinaed and Isabella are fugitives.
There’s also this line during the sexytimes: “Cinaed was like some winged god of carnal pleasure who traveled from Olympus to breathe life into her and her alone.”
Okay.
The reveal at the end had me confused a bit although I might be overthinking.
Edited to add, 4 May: My mistake: the hero is actually the illegitimate grandson of Bonnie Prince Charlie, not the son. That means the math makes sense. I still feel the same way about him suddenly being the rightful heir to Charles Stuart as it was a big plot point that didn’t come up until the very end with few clues pointing to it.
Regardless, it was a little bit much for me, probably because there weren’t any real clues leading up to it. The fact I misread doesn’t change my feeling on the lack of internal conflicts or the reveal being shoe horned in at the end.
So while Highland Crown suffers from a lack of internal conflict and a weird reveal at the end, it is a fun read with lots of action and adventure. Having a female doctor for a main character, plus having her entrenched with Scottish rebels on the run from a very bad British soldier, gave it an Outlander feel that I enjoyed. I also thought Jean could be the female stand-in for Murtagh, and as the plot got wilder I appreciated her “are you fucking kidding me right now?” reality checks.
For me, this book doesn’t stand out greatly from the historical crowd, but I’ll probably pick up the next book in the series to see what (if anything) is done with the reveal at the end. If you like historicals with a lot of fast-paced action and don’t mind insta-love, then this book may work nicely for you.
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So Cinnead got his own age wrong by about 40 years (Charlie’s left Scotland in 1746)? No, thanks.
A+ GIFs Elyse
Five years ago that reveal would have had me thinking …okay? Thanks to Outlander, my Outlander obsessed BFF and the many Outlander obsessed friends I now have thanks to the Outlander vacation every two years, I now have more knowledge of all things Scotland than an Italian girl should. That reveal today would probably have landed that book against the wall. Way to pull you right out of a story.
Thanks for the review, Elyse.
@Msb, Charlie didn’t stop having sex when he left Scotland.
Just a quick drop in to clarify something. Cinaed is NOT son of Charlie. The book DOES not state that.
Thank you so much for reviewing this book. Truly appreciate the honest review. Royal Highlander Series takes place during 1820 Rising. There is an interview on our web page that explains much of the back story to real events.
@Nikoo McGoldrick Oh, dear – my mistake. Thank you for pointing that out. I misread the line in my e-galley. The facts of the review have been corrected in the spoiler above.
Fun (and random) fact: The book considered to be the first ever historical fiction novel was about the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. It is Waverley by Walter Scott (published in 1814); an absolute fun ride featuring action, adventure, romance, history and politics. His book, Rob Roy, set around the 1715-16 rebellion, is brilliant as well (and better imo). I cut my teeth on Scottish history on Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson novels, and they’re a must read if you are interested in that time period.
Thank you Elyse for correction.
@Jos totally agree about Walter Scott. That is why he is so much of this entire series. His work is the model of the Highland image we’ve come to love and admire.
I deeply love Team McGoldrick and liked this a little bit more than you, but it really did feel more like an adventure than a romance and semi-suffers from so much action being jam packed into things. Also that cliffhanger!
You know the plot’s overstuffed when you don’t have room for the tender preamble from Sir Walter Scott about the heroine’s doctoring.
@3
You will have ssen the correction made after my comment, that Cinnead is Charlie’s grandson.
Yes, indeed, Charlie had an illigitimate daughter after leaving Scotland, as well as becoming a full-time alcoholic. But it’s hard to imagine how a child conceived and presumably born in Europe would have a Scottish family and be raised Scottish.
Apparently some little old ladies in North Carolina used to believe they were Charlie’s descendants, too. All that would need to have happened was for Charlie to have sex, while in drag as a female servant, with Flora MacDonald in a rowboat, and for Flora to have absent-mindedly abandoned their child in North Carolina, where she lived for a few years before returning to the UK (story stolen from Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen)I would think that would be too much for a romance writer, but I could be wrong.
So, did Jean accompany them on their travels? It sounds like she was with them after they left Duff’s Head. And, for some reason, I kinda want to read more about Jean…
Susan – Jean accompanies them through the majority of the novel! In fact they make a really fun comedy trio IMO.