You know the trope: a less-than-perfect son, Carter Porter, is dealing with a mystery surrounding his recently deceased father. Between Carter’s drinking, divorce, deaths of his daughter and father, and an attack on the historical site he was supposed to be guarding, Carter is having a bad run. It gets even worse when his car share driver is shot to death. When a mysterious letter arrives with the promise of a first-class ticket to Scotland, Carter takes it without thinking. In Scotland, inn worker Hassie Douglass is dealing with her own loss: her grandfather’s terminal lung-cancer diagnosis. When she finds some gold coins on the edge of Loch Ness, she believes they’ll help get her father better care. Instead she is drawn into a plot to find and steal a centuries’ old treasure meant to help the Jacobites put a Stuart king on the English throne. She and Carter, along with a dog and an amateur historian, fight to save the Jacobite treasure along with exploring one of the oldest stories in Scotland: Is Nessie real?
I enjoyed most of this book. It’s a pretty tropey treasure-hunter adventure with likable characters who are fairly three-dimensional. The magical element was fun, but I think there was a missed opportunity in rooting it more firmly in Scottish and Gaelic folktales and mythology. The biggest issue I had was some of the dialogue. One interaction between several of the characters was so rife with exposition that I sort of tuned out to a lot of it. The dialogue just didn’t sound natural.
Laura Darrell supplied a great narration. She had to switch between several accents: American, Scottish, Russian, Italian, English... The tension she imparted to the story worked great too. I listen at 1.5 speed, and the pace was appropriate for the narrative.
This seems to be the author’s first published novel, and I look forward to seeing what Hunter H. White does in the future. I received this audiobook from NetGalley.
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