The Wild Island
Pages: 196
|Published: 1 Jan 1978
Description
Here, Jemima Shore, investigator and TV personality, arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday. The sun is shining. Paradise, she thinks. But at that moment, she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral. "
So begins an adventure far removed from Jemima's visions of heather-covered hills, crystal-clear streams, romantic men in kilts, fairy-tale castles. . . . Instead, she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions, its jealousies, and its violence, in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting is the Wild Island itself, sometimes enchanting, but too often frighteningly remote; the streams, not silvery, but brown and sinister; her holiday home, with its disturbing, sometimes terrifying, influences; the people--the dashing war hero Colonel Henry and his sons, the forthright old priest Father Flanagan, Bridie the family servant, Clementina the wayward heiress. . . none of them quite what they seem.
And then there is the specter of the Scottish "freedom fighters," in the shape of the self-styled army of the Red Rose.
It all adds up to a brilliantly told story of mystery and intrigue on the Wild Island.
So begins an adventure far removed from Jemima's visions of heather-covered hills, crystal-clear streams, romantic men in kilts, fairy-tale castles. . . . Instead, she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions, its jealousies, and its violence, in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting is the Wild Island itself, sometimes enchanting, but too often frighteningly remote; the streams, not silvery, but brown and sinister; her holiday home, with its disturbing, sometimes terrifying, influences; the people--the dashing war hero Colonel Henry and his sons, the forthright old priest Father Flanagan, Bridie the family servant, Clementina the wayward heiress. . . none of them quite what they seem.
And then there is the specter of the Scottish "freedom fighters," in the shape of the self-styled army of the Red Rose.
It all adds up to a brilliantly told story of mystery and intrigue on the Wild Island.
