Beautifully written, with tight plotting, a mastery mystery with plenty of action and vapourising sincere time-honoured romantic scrush with characters who rise from the page with abounding realism of the era and.. give life-affirming hope on a dark Hebridean island of wild seas, heavily laden with brooding island mentality atmospherics. This is the best Nigel Tranter I've read so far. Excellent shorter mystery novel I would certainly read again.