Glendraco by Black, Laura - 1977

London, UK: Hamish Hamilton, 1977. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. h/b 364 pages, condition is very good, minor edge wear to the DJ. To the great castle of Glendraco, one day in 1860, came Kirstie Drummond - slim, with dark red hair, nearly eighteen years old. The means of her arrival were unorthodox, not to say shocking. She ran away from her grand-parents' dour Edinburgh house, and from the clammy hand of the doctor to whom she had been promised in marriage. She was literally picked up in his gig by the very handsome Lord Cricklade. She was delivered to the aged Countess of Draco - 'the Dragon' to half Scotland - who seemed almost to adopt her. The effect of Kirstie's face, in the wild and remote glen of the Draco, was extraordinary. Many men fell in love with her beauty and vivacity. Others reacted violently to her uncanny likeness to her long-dead Drummond grand-father, about whom there was a shameful mystery. And there lay great danger for Kirstie. She met hatred as well as love in the glen. She met treachery, disgrace, the threat of death. Into her life came friends and enemies - Lord Caerlaverock and Sir Hannibal Mainwaring, Georgie Buchan and the half-crazed Dandie MacKillop, the chattering Mrs Forbes and the icy Marchioness of Odiham, the revengeful Eugenie and stiff, disapproving Lord Draco. Slowly she' put together the pieces of the jigsaw which would reveal the terrible truth about her grandfather's death. Not until she herself faced death, in the unspeakable slums of Glasgow's Saltmarket, did the full story emerge. Laura Black is a major new talent in the world of the historical novel. Castle and miserable croft, palace and teeming slum, city and wild Highland hill, are evoked with brilliance and accuracy. A gallery of highly coloured, wholly credible people throngs these pages. And in Kirstie Drummond the reader meets the most sparkling and lovable heroine imaginable. No one can fail to be swept away by her adventures.