5 intriguing stars I🌟

The Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison is a complex Historical Mystery set in the mid 1700’s. I cannot say how much I have enjoyed this book other than stating on my 2nd reread I am keeping my original 5 star rating. This book has everything I love about good historical fiction; complexity of storylines, characters with depth and involved backstories, and most important for a mystery, a resolution that keeps one guessing till the end. This is historical mystery at it’s finest!
The novel begins in the mid 1700’s aboard a convict ship bound for the North American territories. It is carrying Scot’s Highlanders who have been convicted of crimes ranging from grave digging to aiding and abetting a fugitive, but their main offense is being Highlanders. It is post Culloden, the final battle between the Scot’s and the British. After Culloden the British were determined to teach them a lesson and wipe out their culture and their very existence. The men aboard the ship have each had their prison sentences changed to transportation to America and and a period of indentured servitude to Lord Ramsey. He is a relative of the King who is developing land into settlements in the untamed territory around New York.
During the ships passage several suicides occur. Duncan McCallum, our protagonist, as a former student of medicine, is the only educated Scot amongst the convicts. He is tasked with investigating the suicides and the presence of a strange circle made up of strange symbols, bird bones, feathers and a heart. Duncan determines that one of the suicides is actually a murder. The victim is the man hired to be Lord Ramsey’s children’s tutor. This position will now be filled by Duncan upon arrival in the New World. Who killed the tutor, who left the cryptic circle and who is the strange woman being kept sedated in a cabin by the Vicar Arnold, Lord Ramsey’s representative? These form the basis of the mysteries that need to be solved. Very few answers are given and clues come at a fast pace but are often vague and contradictory. This is not a mystery you will have figured out by page 100!
This book is not just a great mystery but it’s also great Historical Fiction. Upon arrival in New York, Duncan finds himself in an unknown yet vaguely familiar world. It is the time of the French and Indian Wars, when the Huron aided the French and the Iroquois aided the British. Pattison does a great job comparing and contrasting both the Celtic Culture of the Highlanders and the Culture of the Indigenous Peoples, both groups fated to lose their way of life due to the British. This all adds multiple layers to the story and to the mystery and adds greatly to the readers enjoyment!
I have barely touched the surface of this story! If you love Historical Fiction with a healthy dose of mystery this book is for you.
I want to touch on the way I read this book. I recently joined Scribd, a monthly subscription service for Ebooks and Audiobooks. Having read two out of this six book series via kindle I wanted to try the audiobook version. Because I owned the ebook version and the first five audiobooks are on Scribd I tried immersion reading for the first time. Some of you may know that I went blind in my right eye this year making reading very difficult. The combo of audiobook and the kindle version was perfect for me. Reading was a pleasure again! I cannot recommend this service highly enough! Furthermore at a cost of $12 a month it’s a great value!
Whether you try immersion reading or not I highly recommend trying the audiobook version. I usually do not like male narrators since I find their female voices creepy. Having said that this narrator, Matthew Waterson, did a phenomenal acting job. His accents were spot on and he delineates all the different characters very well, even the females, minus the creep factor! I will be listening to the remainder of this series using the immersion technique! ( )

I really liked this book. The mystery is good but the everyday events especially revolving around the French and Indian War and how the colonies were not as ideal as some histories make them out to be. I really enjoyed the historical fiction aspect of it. I also appreciate how nothing was really made out to be black or white but shades of grey particularly the characters. One or two were definitely not fully fleshed out but otherwise the characters were more than caricatures. ( )

I got to about page 50 before quitting. The premise might have been promising if the story moved a bit quicker, but I didn't find it catching my imagination. Which is disappointing because I read a lot about the 18th century in my study of the American Revolution (although this story takes place earlier than that).

I liked this one quite a lot; well written, good story, done. ( )

I am a huge fan of Eliot Pattison; he has written some of my favorite books, and this one joins that list. While his Inspector Shan Tao Yun series is more contemporary, this one is set during the French and Indian War in colonial America. You might not think that one can write modern Tibet and Colonial America with the same degree of detail and character, but Pattison does. This is ostensibly a mystery, but as with the Shan novels, this protagonist, Duncan McCullum, solves not just a murder, but begins the process of unraveling the mystery of his own heart. Highly recommended! ( )