The Inscription
Pam Binder
Sonnet Books
Fiction, Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Romance
Themes: Cross-Genre, Cryptids, Hidden Wonders, Time Travel
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Description
In many corners of the world, a legend is whispered of a race of immortals. In the fifteenth-century Scottish Highlands, where myths grow thicker than heather on
the hills, these stories find flesh in the MacAlpins and their castle on the shores of Loch Ness. The MacAlpin laird, the handsome Lachlan, is strong and wise, an
arbiter of justice and reason. He is also cursed, as his father was before him, with a terrible bloodlust. The savage thirst for death fills him more and more whenever
he bares his blade in battle. Though he tries to avoid conflict, sometimes it comes searching for him. An immortal Mongolian enemy makes his way to MacAlpin territory,
bent on revenge, sowing death and destruction in his wake. Lachlan feels the shadow of his curse growing darker across his destiny, a doom as inevitable as the coming
confrontation... but there may be hope, in an old legend which even his own immortal kin hardly believe, about a woman whose healing love will transcend time...
Amber MacPhee, visiting her Aunt Dora in Inverness, was driving past Loch Ness when a freak lightning storm drove her car into the icy waters. She woke in the arms
of a tartaned man, in a place that seems to be taking medieval reenactment far too seriously. She has spent her life as many in the twentieth century do, flooding her
schedule with a constant flurry of external activity to avoid a deep internal void. Her Scottish hero might fill that void, but he hides his heart as well as she hides
hers. Can a love out of legend redeem them both, or is Lachlan doomed to lose his heart and his life to the monster that dwells within?
Review
No, I don't normally read romances. They can tend to put plot on the back burner, playing out as overlong seduction scenes with fairly predictable endings. This book
is no exception. Amber and Lachlan waver back and forth over their feelings and motivations depending on whether the author wanted to heat up a scene or cool it down.
The story of Lachlan's blood enemy seeking vengeance on his doorstep lacked bite. The climax felt tacked on, ending abruptly. Binder's descriptons of life in the
medieval Highlands were decent, though I'm not sure how many Irish Wolfhounds (as opposed to Scottish Deerhounds) were running around on the shores of Loch Ness. (I would
also dispute identifying the legendary Loch Ness Monster with a Brachiosaurus-like dinosaur - the idea that they were aquatic has largely been debunked - but I
digress.)
Overall, considering that I only picked this book up to kill time, I can't say I hated it. I can say that I preferred it to Diana Gabaldon's The
Outlander, which uses the vaguely similar plot of a (nearly) modern woman plunging backwards in time to warm the bed of a Highlander; Binder, at least, didn't derail
the minimal plot to delve into the downright sick territory Gabaldon explored at the end. I suppose I'm just not a fan of romance novels, even romance novels with the
sci-fi twist of time travel.