Highland Defender

This was another book that someone bought me for my birthday as a joke. So, of course, I read it.

I’m glad I did. It wasn’t as terrible as I feared (that’s a wildly elitist statement, I know).

It’s the story of Bane Morgan, a fighter from the Scottish Highlands in the 1400s, who finds himself drunk in an alley in Edinburgh, tormented by a decision he made in battle that killed some of his men. Then there’s Lucia Symington, a chaste lass working off her father’s debt to the evil Lady Currie.

Bane and Lucia happen to meet, and, well, it kind of goes how you think it will.

There was less explicit sex than I expected, given the genre. Only two scenes. Bane and Lucia seem to be far more concerned with getting married than in getting each others’ clothes off.

I had two problems with the book.

• The author always told rather than described. You didn’t need to evaluate the action of a scene and draw your own conclusions, because the author told you exactly what to think about it and what the characters were thinking in the moment.

• There’s zero dramatic tension in the end. Everything just kind of works out. They come up with a plan about 2/3 of the way through, then that plan just…works. The main antagonist is defeated at about the 80% mark, and the rest is this happy, clean ending. I kept waiting for there to be a plot twist, but there just…wasn’t.

Maybe those two points are common in the genre? No idea.

But I didn’t hate the book. In the end, I was rooting for the two protagonists. I also liked how the author wrote the dialog. For example:

I stumbled over it at first, but by the end, I could read it in a Scottish brogue, which was fun.

Glad I read it.