Pam Binder
Sonnet Books
Fiction, Romance
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In many corners of the world, a legend is whispered of a secretive 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, a savage thirst for death that fills him more and more whenever he bares his blade in battle. Though he may try to avoid combat, sometimes it comes seeking him out. As an immortal Mongolian enemy makes his way to MacAlpin territory, bent on revenge, 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, a legend 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 hide a deep internal void. Her Scottish hero may 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 usually put plot on the back burner, playing out as an overlong seduction scene 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 enemy seeking vengeance on his doorstep lacked bite, and his face-to-face meeting with his nemesis is practically over before it begins; his real enemy, I suppose, is supposed to be his curse of blood-fury, but I still expected more out of a nemesis who spent years honing his blade and his sadism under the nefarious Genghis Khan. 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 in the 1400's. (I also dispute the idea that the Loch Ness Monster could be a creature resembling a Brachiosaurus, as is implied here - the "aquatic brachiosaur" idea was debunked when it was shown that their lungs would collapse under that much water - 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.
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