Mary of Lorraine: An Historical Romance
1880
Mary of Lorraine opens on Fawside Tower, where Lady Alison Kennedy waits in the gray shadows of the Scottish highlands for word of her son. Her husband lies dead by Hamiltons of Preston steel, and she has spent years forging her remaining boys into instruments of vengeance. The feud between the Fawsides and the Hamiltons has festered for generations, but Lady Alison has made it her life's work to see it end in blood. As political intrigue tightens around the court of Mary of Lorraine, personal grudges become tangled with the survival of kingdoms. James Grant renders 16th-century Scotland with visceral precision: its brutal clan politics, its superstitious darkness, its unbending codes of honor where a man's name is worth more than his life. This is historical fiction that understands revenge is a debt that compounds with every payment - and that some mothers, in seeking to slake their grief, drown their children instead. The novel asks what remains when the last enemy falls, and whether any victory in such a war brings anything but ash.
