To Desire a Highlander

August 17, 2015
The lead couple in Welfonder’s second Scandalous Scots medieval romance (after To Love a Highlander) unexpectedly cede center stage to the author’s purple prose (“a terrible tingly warmth spread across her most private places”) and melodramatic storytelling. The serviceable plot is given just enough of a twist to avoid staleness. Instead of the usual device of a knight sent to take control of an area by marrying into local nobility, Roag the Bear assumes the identity of a dead man, Donnell MacDonnell, to use the man’s Hebridean island as a base to stop attacks against his king’s ships. MacDonnell was betrothed, so Roag must handfast Lady Gillian MacGuire, who last saw her loathsome fiancé five years earlier and cannot understand how this handsome man could be her husband-to-be. Roag isn’t the only one with secrets. Gillian’s look innocuous enough, but there’s an unnecessary doozy among them. Unfortunately, Welfonder metes out almost every revelation so slowly that her storytelling has a staged feel to it, which overshadows the actual romance. Agent: Roberta Brown, Brown Literary Agency.