I finished reading this book a couple of days ago, closed it, set it down, went on about my business. This morning, I picked it up so I could write the review. The problem was, I could barely remember a thing about it. In two days, I’d forgotten the names of the characters and the basic plot. Now, I may not have a mind like a steel trap, but I can generally recall the details of a book I’ve just finished reading. Bottom line? Unfortunately, Isle of Skye is pretty forgettable.

Regan Southworth (which is thomwhat hard to thay), is the daughter of an archaeologist. Her father, Seamus Southworth (even Daffy Duck would have trouble with this one), has been searching for Avalon for years. He feels he may have discovered it on the Isle of Skye, but the owner, Lachlan MacGregor (the Mad Lord of Druidean) will not allow anybody to dig for clues on his property. Regan and Lachlan meet one night when Regan is clandestinely digging amid a ring of stones and she sees Lachlan teetering on the brink of a cliff. Thinking he’s about to commit suicide, she flings herself at him, knocking him off. Since Lachlan was only admiring the view, this angers him somewhat but Regan is so lovely he becomes smitten, against his will of course.

The next time they meet, Regan is in a rowboat with her Evil Landlord who tries to force himself on her. Rather than be compromised, Regan jumps into the freezing water – in her requisite forty pounds of clothing – and nearly drowns. Lachlan, watching from astride his horse above the beach, sees this and swims out to rescue her. When he asks her why she did such a nutso thing as that, she refuses to tell him for fear of looking stupid. But Regan looks pretty stupid anyway, dripping wet and nearly dead. Lachlan leaps to the wrong conclusion that she the Evil Landlord’s mistress. And these are the smart people in the story.

To keep Regan out of the circle of stones – which Lachlan claims is a place of death – and to keep a lustful eye on her, he offers her a job (actually, he gives her no choice) as his grandmother’s companion. Lachlan is about to turn thirty-five and certain he’ll soon be going mad. His father and grandfather both went stark raving, and he’s vowed never to marry in order to break the curse (stop me if any of this sounds familiar). The castle itself seems to breathe and even speak on occasion, a phenomenon which is never explained, but at least the building seems to be on Regan and Lachlan’s side.

Regan has a sister and Lachlan has a brother, and there are various servants who come and go. Much of the time, not much happens in Isle of Skye except that Lachlan thinks about Regan and gets rock hard. This euphemism is used in just about every romance novel I’ve ever read, and I guess I’ll just take a stand now and say this one has gotten pretty old, and in a book that’s not holding my interest anyway, trite phrases simply add to my discontent.

There is a mystery: who really killed The Flame, Lachlan’s red-haired mother? It helps when the murdered woman has left a detailed diary with all kinds of clues in it. But a question I have is, when a character in a book finds a hidden diary, why does it take so long for the character to read it? If I found the diary of a murdered person, I’d sit right down and not get up again until I’d read the whole thing, but Regan doles it out, reading only a few passages a night. Eh.

Lachlan is a rather bland leading man. He has inherited the white streak in his black hair that all the MacGregor men have. I can only assume a child who did not display this genetic anomaly would be ostracized as being illegitimate. He lusts after Regan, then decides he must have her even though he has sworn never to marry for fear of passing on his madness. Yet, he has sex with her and doesn’t seem to think twice about how he could still pass along his madness in a child conceived out of wedlock.

While Lachlan’s father’s madness may have been explained, his grandfather’s never was. Quin, Lachlan’s younger brother, is learning impaired, but he speaks as a normal person would (a normal person with a Scottish accent). That reminds me. This is another book in which the dialect is incorporated into the text. Scottish dialogue is very difficult to read and slows the flow enormously. A few words here and there would have sufficed.

While this book wasn’t really bad, it wasn’t really good, either. Just sort of there. Originally, I had planned to give it a C-, but as I wrote the review, I realized that it wasn’t an average read, but somewhat less. The characters do some dumb things and not all the strings are tied off at the end, but I rather didn’t care since I never grew close to anybody on the Isle of Skye.