Many Scottish historicals are set either in medieval times or the period surrounding the Jacobite Uprising of Bonnie Prince Charlie, in the mid-1740s. When the Laird Returns gives the reader a glimpse of what the country looked like about a generation later than that, and for that it’s interesting. But an inability to connect emotionally with the hero and heroine, and annoyance at a red herring or two, marred my enjoyment of this book.

When successful shipbuilder Alisdair MacRae journeys to Scotland to see the land his parents left behind as they fled Scotland immediately after the Uprising, he encounters a mysterious young woman in the ruins of his family’s castle of Gilmuir. She turns out to be Iseabel Drummond, the daughter of Magnus, a greedy, villainous fellow and longtime foe to the MacRae clan who’s now claiming and using MacRae land as his own. Spurred by impulse, Alisdair demands that Drummond give up claim to the land, but Magnus has a better idea: Alisdair can have it, for a price. And the price includes marrying Iseabel. With great misgivings, the younger man agrees, planning to get his land, get the girl out of there, and have the marriage annulled later.

Alisdair takes his bride and sails off to England to visit the Sherbourne estate. In the wake of the Uprising, Alisdair’s father Ian Landers had faked his own death and taken his wife’s name of MacRae to escape hanging as a traitor to the Crown. Now, Ian’s brother David is dead, and Alisdair is presumed the heir to the earldom of Sherbourne. He’s coming to pay his respects to his step-grandmother Patricia (erroneously referred to as the Countess of Sherbourne, since she lost that title when she remarried after the old earl’s death), and to waive his right to inherit the title and estates. Well, that’s his plan, anyway. He begins to feel differently once he arrives and speaks with Patricia.

Iseabel may be glad to escape her brutal father, but she’s none too sure about her new husband. Aboard his ship, and for the first few days of their visit to Sherbourne, Alisdair treats her with a detached sort of kindness, and it doesn’t take long for Iseabel to realize she’d like a lot more than that out of him. But how to engage his affections, when he’s married her out of necessity and not any kind of real affection? Patricia, however, is a resourceful and incurable romantic, and she set the wheels in motion so that it will be impossible for the couple to seek annulment of their wedding vows.

The front end of the book went kind of slowly for me, so that I had a hard time getting into the narrative flow. Things picked up in the second half, when they return to Gilmuir and Magnus’s henchmen kidnap Alisdair to sell him into indentured servitude. But by that point it was too late for me to make any kind of meaningful emotional connection with either Alisdair or Iseabel. While I understood the attraction between the couple, I never really felt it, if you know what I mean. And Iseabel’s misgivings in the last part of the book (“How can he love me when I’m the daughter of the man who’s done such a horrible thing to him?”) struck me as downright irrational.

It’s clear that When the Laird Returns is part of a series, but to her credit Ranney avoids overloading the reader with backstory from the previous book (there’s a bittersweet and credible reunion of separated lovers, and I appreciated that). Yet her foreshadowing of the books to come is a bit heavy-handed: I grew impatient with what I thought were overly long stretches of exposure to Alisdair’s brothers – four of ’em – and this slowed down the pace of the book for me, as it detracted from time spent with the heroine and hero. There was also a potential threat to Alisdair’s inheritance, in the person of Patricia’s – bailiff or steward, I forget which – but that turned out to be a dead end. You know the saying: Don’t put a gun on the mantel in Act I unless you plan to use it by the end of Act III. This gun never fired, so why put it in there?

Although I was a bit disappointed in this particular book, I can still give it a qualified recommendation. I think Karen Ranney is one of the most accomplished writers of historical romance around. Her prose is very polished, she’s very readable, and her settings are never mere window dressing. Not only can Ranney convey a sense of time and place like few other authors, her love scenes are intense, giving her books a well-rounded quality. I look forward to her future books, and I only hope she can snag my emotional attention a little bit sooner in them than she did in When the Laird Returns.