Highland Sinner by Hannah Howell

Tormond Murphy is a decorated noble and well-known lover of women, but when he awakes in the bed of a murdered woman, nearly lying in a pool of her blood, he knows he is no murderer. Luckily, this particular noblewoman is known to be very free with her favors, and he has been in them enough times to know several secret ways to be in and out of her bower. So he makes his escape, but wonders who hates him enough to kill a woman he once loved and blame him for the crime.

He returns home, and is not surprised to be blamed for the crime by some people, but luckily, he was not found with the body, so there is enough question that most people reserve judgement as to his blame. But it does bring his cousin Simon to him, another well-known and decorated Knight to question Tormand about his possible involvement in her death. Tormand protests his innocence, and a possible solution is floated, a woman named the Ross Witch, who has the power to touch items relating to a crime or death and see a true vision of who or what was involved.

She is Morainn, and she's already been having visions of both Tormond, who she knows to be innocent of the murders, and the real killers. but when three woman lay dead and she is finally brought in by Simon to meet Tormond and find the actual killers of the women, she finds herself drawn to Tormond, and although she fosters a child named Walin, a boy who was abandoned on her doorstep, Morainn is an innocent, though village tales paint her as a woman of easy virtue and claim that Walin is her son.

But what she is truly not prepared for is Tormand and Simon's easy acceptance of her gifts, which she has found troublesome her entire life. She doesn't know if she can quite believe the tales of the women of their clan, many of which have the same sort of powers she can wield, and who are well-loved and accepted. And she finds it hard to deal with her attraction to a man so well-used as Tormond. She might be an innocent, but Tormand is nothing like an innocent, and his expertise in such matters flusters her.

But two killers are out there, and Morainn just barely escapes them wanting to kill her to keep their identities safe. Most unusual yet is that one of the killers is a woman, a very crazy and insane woman who is using the killings to take revenge on Tormond for some imagined slight done to her in the past. The man who is helping her is a servant of hers, a huge man who has no problem killing and murdering for his mistress. But can Simon catch them before they take out Morainn and come back to finish off Tormond for the crime of setting off a crazy woman?

Wow. I found myself really chilled by the murderers in this novel. Despite the fact that this is a romance novel and not really a thriller or suspense story, I was genuinely terrified by the killers, who are a unique set of crazy that made me shiver in memory long after the novel was done.

That being said, I got tired of the Scottish accents long before the novel was over. I prefer a lighter hand on the accent so I can imagine the accent in my head without having to read an overabundance of creative spellings that acts as a shorthand for the Scottish accent on the page. An occasional "mon" or "dinna" isn't a problem for me to read, but when it takes up half the page, my internal spelling Nazi rebels and it soon becomes grating to my mind's ear. I was so ready not to have to read another Scottish accent for a long, long while after finishing this book!

Still, it's a very effective romance as well. While my annoyance spiked at the "Scottish accent" on the page, the story mostly let me look past that to enjoy the meat of the writer's words and story themselves, but I would definitely enjoy them more if the "accent" wasn't so darned omnipresent. I mean, hey, the story takes place in Scotland. Everyone speaks in a Scottish accent. Why not just drop the faux-Scottishisms and let the characters speak more or less normally?

So I recommend it, but you might end up wanting to beat the Scottishisms to death by the end of the book like I did. Or not. But it will be a while before I read another book set in Scotland, that you can believe!