Caledonia finds a statue in Loch Tay and her salvage company brings it up. Her ex-husband turns up in town wanting her to go back to work for his salvage company. Caledonia says no but he won't give up and spies on her. Caledonia has been hearing voices connected to a poem she found as a child. Now the voices have meaning for her with the retrieval of the statue who turns human at night. Struan is uncertain what is going on. It is up to one of the spirits who Caledonia has heard to explain it to Struan. He is attracted to Caledonia as she is to him. But will they act upon the attraction? Will Struan's curse be lifted? Will they be together? Will Kip destroy what Caledonia and Struan have?

I enjoyed this story. I liked Caledonia and Struan. I also liked her parents and the O'Reilly brothers who work for Caledonia. They provide comic relief. I like the uncertainty between Caledonia and Struan of who will speak of love first. I found his brothers dropping hints for what Struan had to do funny. They would not come out and say what he and she had to do. Caledonia was oblivious to the hints

I look forward to reading the other books in the series.

I like Barbara Bard, I really do but this book is as dry as the Sahara desert, definitely one of her worst that I have read.

There is nothing to connect to and no characters to really care about, motives make no sense and people change just because the plot needs them to, without any growth or logic behind it.

(*examples given below might be SPOILERS*)

The storyline. If I just write it in a few short points, nothing looks amiss but then you read the book and you see nothing actually connects the plot threads and there is no logic behind things happening and everything happens just to connect one point to another disregarding any common sense known to humans.
Example: So this kidnapped woman who was taken deep into Scotland allegedly writes home to telltale about the weakness in the defence of this estate and her father receives the letter and rides of to see the king to get support and gets back home with it and manages to go rescue his daughter in the span of three days and he somehow manages this great feat and since the highlanders were surprised and unprepared they weren't really defending and instead of the English (remember, the King's troops are also there) invading and fully defeating them after their Laird has been beaten to a bloody pulp in front of everyone (and they don't kill him for some reason), no, they just get this insignificant woman and leave. Ah, yes, makes sense (notice the irony).

The characters. What a bunch of dry stale cookie cutter characters. They are not believable, they are not like real humans, we do not connect to them, they are just cardboard printouts to stand there as the so called plot happens around them. I have no idea how this good author have managed to spit out such bland idiotic pieces of s... *coughs... let's be civil here. How she managed to produce these, these ehm... characters in name only. There is nothing about them that makes them believable, it's horrible. They are awful people and only act a certain way when the plot needs them to.
Example 1: Gabby, the main female character, is supposed to be some kind of a progressive thinker in the area where she lives but then people tell her that Highlanders drink blood and eat human flesh and she believes it fully without a second thought. Or she is supposed to be a strong woman who was kidnapped and forced into marriage but then resists and all we see how upset she is that the husband doesn't immediately boink her right there and then.
Example 2: Callum, the main male character, is supposed to be this scarred wounded Highlander whose love died some years back and his world crushed then and he was left a shell of a man and then we see he immediately boinked the dead woman's best friend and kept on boinking her until this English woman disrupted his life somewhat. Such an upstanding good man that is. Totally don't want him to die a horrible death, nope, totally not.
Example 3: Callum's father needs his son to marry so he will secure his future Laird position and it has to be done immediately for some inexplicable reason and so instead of him trying to find him a Highlander woman and takes a bit more time, he just raids an English estate and kidnaps a woman there and thinks that is a good idea. How is that logical to begin with? When bunch of things just make no sense to begin with, how am I supposed to care about any of it?

Characters continuously do a 180 turn whenever the plot calls for it and it's painfully aggravating.
Example 1: Gabby's fiance whom she was supposed to marry (forcefully as well) was her childhood friend whom she saw as a brother. He wanted her and pushed himself on her much worse than the Highlander later on. He did not want to listen to one word she said, no objection or complaint. When Gabby is kidnapped and taken he told her she must be glad she is being kidnapped to get her adventure and laughs evilly. When she is mistakenly brought back, he pushes himself on her again and basically forces her to marry him, again. And then on the wedding day when she is already there somewhat willing, he does a 180 and just says that there are people outside who will escort her back to Scotland. What the actual f*ck? He did not develop as a character in the meantime and nothing happened to him to change his awful almost-rapey behaviour from before. He just becomes a saint so she can be delivered back to her husband.
Example 2: Callum does not give two s$its about Gabby when she is married to him, he even goes to be with his mistress (the dead fiancees best friend if you remember), and tells to Gabby that it is normal for men to have mistresses and he can do as he pleases, then he suddenly loves her a chapter later. Ah yes... love at a hundredth sight that must be.

I could go on and on like this for the whole night. Characters do things just because the plot needs them to. There is nothing to them, they are hollow, empty, non-existent.

There are so many plot points that lead to nothing and waste time that keep coming back to me as I write that I still don't understand how is this possible coming from the great Barbara Bard. Absolutely dumbfounding.

Skip if you can, if you must read it then be prepared to be extremely annoyed. I am not giving it a 1* because it is still written better than some other things I have read, looking more from a technical standpoint but there are really no good points I could now think of and point out. I am just so disappointed and... well... unhappy.

So what happened at the end there, Val?  Why that infernal rush?  Did you suddenly become aware that you were on your way towards producing a minor brick, or did your publisher tell you to cut it short?  There we were, sailing nicely along in the usual 4-stars-or-higher bracket into which this series typically falls for me, and then you first give us an arrest that couldn't be a greater possible anticlimax, taking into account all that's at stake there, and, literally as an aside, almost everything else that had been threatening to come crashing down on Karen's head is tied up super-squeaky-clean in no more than a few puny words as well??  Fie.

Also -- and I do realize this one is down to me, but nevertheless it does add to my aggravation -- can we please be done with Karen's new superior officer sooner rather than later?  I've had my own share of run-ins with this type of person way beyond anything I'm willing to take anymore (it also doesn't help that I've recently seen -- and am currently seeing again -- shenanigans of a different, but equally infuriating kind); so the prospect that of all Karen's problems that were still unresolved in the next-to-last chapter, this of all things is the one issue remaining unresolved, makes me not particularly rush to get the next book, whenever it's going to be published.  I seriously do NOT want to meet this person again.  And unlike poor Karen, I have the freedom to opt out here; which I may very well end up doing, unless someone tells me that the supervisor in question is getting her long-overdue comeuppance and Karen is rid of her by the end of the next book at the very latest.

Finally, just curious: What's your fascination with dead bodies surfacing from the depth of a peat bog?  This has to be at least the second, if not third book where that sort of thing is happening ...

This book was such a disappointment. I loved Loupas' book, The Red Lily Crown. I loved how she told tales of the de Medici family and brought Renaissance Italy with all its intrigue to life. Someone who did what she did with the de Medici's should have easily handled Mary, Queen of Scots, and all the drama of her Scottish entourage. One would think.

This book was a disaster from the start. Rinette's wedding is forcibly disrupted by a group of Scottish brutes who want to force her marriage to someone else. This starts a theme that will carry throughout the entire novel. ALL Scottish men are brutes. They are savage, bodice-ripping, dagger-carrying, brawling-in-the-streets brutes. The French aren't any nicer but they dress better so the author is a little more forgiving of their actions.

And then there is the one and only Mary, Queen of Scots. She was worse than the brutes. For starters, Loupas' MQoS made Charles VI of France look sane. I recognize that there were actual, legit issues with MQoS. Most biographers suggest she suffered from the same disease attributed to King George III's bouts of madness. Sorry but if Mary is really as awful as Loupas makes her out to be, her bastard half brother actually makes her disappear and puts the crown on his own head. He doesn't waste years fighting with her before fleeing the country. So maybe it's all a little more complicated than that. But is it really? Loupas would have you believe that it's really not. After all, Scotland is overrun with violent, wild men who can't stand being told what to do by any woman no matter what her title is.

Somewhere in all of this, there's a casket (foreshadow alert) containing letters and a mysterious prophecy written by the one and only Nostradamus. These items were property of Mary's mother, Marie of Guise. Rinette is entrusted with this casket and told to deliver it into Mary's hands upon Marie's death. Instead of just handing the casket to Mary as soon has she is off her French boat, Rinette decides she's going to hold on to it. She thinks she's going to bargain with someone she hasn't talked to or seen since they were eight years old. Before she had been Queen of France and Queen of Scotland. Spoiler alert- It doesn't work out very well for Rinette. 

Last issue with this book -

I'm so over authors who spend all kinds of time telling me about their heroines who are strong, brave, and independent women who don't need a man only to have the story ending with a woman who needs a man because she spent the whole book making bad choices. That was a terrible run on sentence. It's exactly how the thought came out of my brain. I'm not apologizing. Just acknowledging. Anyway, if she's (Rinette or Mary. Take your pick.) so smart, why does she continue to make so many bad choices? Both things can't be true. Beyonce has told us as much several time. 

Loupas has one other published work I have on my TBR. It takes the reader back to Italy. I'll probably pick it up only because I loved her last venture into Italy. Maybe it's just Scotland with all of its brutes that's the problem. 

If I were able to get to the library right now, this book would have gone back unfinished. As it is, I cannot get to the library so I might as well read all of the books I have. 

Dates read 4/5/2020 - 4/13/2020

Book 25/75 

I thank Harper Collins UK and NetGalley for providing me an ARC copy of this novel, which I freely chose to review.

Lucy Foley is a new author to me but I was intrigued by the premise of the book, which promised to be a look back at the classics but with a modern touch. The format is easily recognisable (a group of people isolated in a somewhat strange setting, a crime, and the suspicions that fall on all those present). I had recently read The Glass Hotel and although they are set in very different locations (the hotel here is in the Scottish Highlands), there were some similarities in the isolation of the place, and in the motivations of some of the employees to seek such isolation, but this is a more conventional caper, where everybody hides secrets, dislikes and even hatreds, and there is a lot of emphasis placed on the relationship between the university friends who go on holiday together even though they no longer have much in common, and whom we get to know pretty well during the book.

There are plenty of lies, obscure motivations, relationships that are not what they seem to be, infidelity, popularity contests, friction between the so-called friends, and the book is told in two separate timeframes, one after the crime (although a bit like in Big Little Lies, we hear about the aftermath of the crime, but who the victim is doesn’t get revealed until almost the very end), and another that follows chronologically from the time when the friends set off towards their holiday destination. Eventually, both narratives catch up, and we get a full understanding of what has gone on.  It’s a great strategy to keep readers guessing, and although I did have my suspicions of at least some of the things that were to come, I admit that there are some interesting red herring thrown into the works . Readers need to remain attentive to the changes in time frame to avoid getting confused as to when things have taken place, although this is clearly stated in the novel.

One of the problems some readers seem to have with the novel is that the characters are not terribly likeable. The story is narrated mostly from the point of view of several of the women: three of the female friends (Emma, the newest one to arrive in the group; Miranda, the Queen Bee who never quite lived up to everybody’s expectations; and Katie, Miranda’s best friend, the only single one, who seems to have outgrown the group in many ways ), and also Heather, the manager of the hotel, who has secrets of her own (and is one of the nicest characters)— all of them told in the first person—, and one man’s point of view, Doug, another employee of the hotel, although in his case we get a third-person account, and one marred by many of his personal difficulties (let’s say that he is not a very reliable narrator). Reading the events from several points of view helps us gain perspective and heightens our suspicions as to what might really be going on. I must agree that the characters, probably because we are privy to their internal thoughts rather than to others’ opinions of them, are difficult to like. Self-obsessed or obsessed with others, with random likes and dislikes, cruel, or unable to face the truth… none of them are people most of us would choose as friends. Considering this is a book about a group of friends, it does offer a particularly grim view of old friendships, emphasising the lack of sincerity and honesty and the dark undertones to most of the relationships between them. On the other hand, I must admit that dark —or at least grey— characters make for a much more interesting reading experience than goody two-shoes.  

The writing style is straight forward and manages to create a clear image of the characters in the reader’s mind. There are some rather memorable scenes as well, but the book takes its time building up the background and the relationships, rather than moving at a fast pace, but still manages to keep readers intrigued and interested.

As I said, I had my suspicions about who the guilty party might be and what was behind the murder from early on (the clues are all there), but nonetheless I found the ending satisfying, and I think most readers will feel the same.

In sum, a solid thriller, that brings back memories of old style mystery novels, with more emphasis on the psychological aspect, and which also has much in common with the domestic noir style (although here transposed to the Highlands). An interesting novel for lovers of the genre, and one that I’m sure in the right hands could be turned into a successful movie.