First published 2010
Carrie McClelland arrives at Slains Castle in Scotland, ready to write her next novel about the 1708 Jacobite invasion. She creates a fictional heroine based on her own ancestor and begins crafting a story about French and Scottish soldiers attempting to restore the exiled James Stewart to his throne. The words flow easily as Carrie imagines her character's life in the castle's shadow. Then strange details emerge in her writing, facts she never researched and events she never planned. Her fiction begins to feel like memory rather than imagination. Carrie realizes she may be channeling real ancestral experiences, uncovering secrets buried for three centuries. The truth she discovers about what really happened during that failed invasion threatens to overwhelm her present life. Knowledge of the ultimate betrayal that doomed the Jacobite cause becomes a burden Carrie struggles to bear.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, supernatural
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, suspenseful
Tropes: channeling-past-lives, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Slains Castle, Scotland
Period: 1708
434 pages · ebook · Sourcebooks Landmark