Devil in Tartan

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In Devil in Tartan,  Julia London’s most recent installment in her Highland Grooms series, Lottie Livingstone finds herself in a pickle. Aulay Mackenzie’s ship is the solution to that pickle, and over the course of a few hundred pages, Lottie goes from maiden daughter to whisky smuggler to pirate to lover to wife in a journey she clearly never imagined. This book is high on swashbuckling and tepid on romance, but anyone who loves a good action/adventure story with kilts and brogues will enjoy themselves just fine.

The fate of Lottie’s small island off the coast of Scotland rests on her shoulders and all of her plans so far have come to naught. She decides to take her clan to the seas as whisky smugglers, but even that goes sideways and she’s forced to commandeer a rival ship to keep the plan afloat (pun intended). The rival ship belongs to Aulay Mackenzie, and he essentially becomes her captive. The book cover summary tells us he “burns with desire to seize control” of both the ship and Lottie herself, which is not something I really saw on the page, but that’s neither here nor there. When the stakes get higher for both of them, Aulay is forced to choose between getting his ship back and building a life with Lottie.

I have enjoyed a number of Ms. London’s books, but haven’t dipped my toe into any from this series and I wonder if that was an error. This book is full of other characters I struggled to keep track of that could well have appeared in other books, but without the foreknowledge I found myself often lost. Combine that with a heroine I found to be meh, a lukewarm romance, and the fact that I never really got into the suspense of the action, and you’ve got a book that isn’t the most compelling of recent memory.

Buy it at: Amazon/Barnes & Noble/iBooks/Kobo

Reviewed by Kristen Donnelly

Grade: C

Book Type: Historical Romance

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date: 08/04/18

Publication Date: 02/2018

Recent Comments …

  1. excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.

Voracious reader, with a preference for sassy romances and happily ever afters. In a relationship with coffee, seeing whiskey on the side.

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Lisa Fernandes
Lisa Fernandes
Guest
04/08/2018 2:44 pm

It’s a shame this one’s weaker; I’m reviewing the fifth book in the series that Caz mentioned above and I’m hoping it improves!

Caz Owens
Caz Owens
Editor
04/08/2018 5:24 am

I’m with you on this one. I listened to the audio version because the narrator is always excellent, but when I came to write a review of the story, I found myself unable to recall much of what happened – because not much did. I liked the first two books in the series (Wild, Wicked Scot and Sinful Scottish Laird), but this and Hard Hearted Highlander were real let downs. I see there’s a fifth book planned, but I’m thinking maybe the author should have quit while she was ahead.