From Kirkus Reviews:
The death of his ailing father, Andrew, brings financial advisor Ian Blackie to Invermuir from Edinburgh to stay for a few weeks with his mother. Exploring the attic of the family home one day, Ian finds a locked box containing an assortment of newspaper clippings, ordnance maps, old books and photographs. Much of the material relates to General Alexander Ballantine, his father's lifetime friend, who was recently killed in a bomb explosion aboard his boat. There's evidence in the clutter of papers of a budding group of Scottish nationalists and of Andrew Blackie's disbelief that the IRA was responsible for his friend's death. Ian begins to follow up the bits and pieces, meeting Ballantine's stepdaughter Isobel, a writer, and gradually coming to share his father's skepticism as he uncovers a small, militaristic band calling themselves Scotland Arise, with unclear ties to the whiskey- distilling industry and plans for an assault of some kind in the works. Then Isobel's country cottage is burned to the ground and Ian finds his own life at risk. His theories fall on deaf ears but are soon to be played out to a worldwide audience. Suspense is tempered by an avalanche of detail and a sometimes flat-footed narrative style, but, still, mostly intriguing-- especially to lovers of the Scottish scene, always disarmingly captured by Grindal (The Whisky Murders, etc.). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly:
The tension diminishes disappointingly as the action intensifies in Grindal's ( Over the Sea to Die ) espionage thriller. In the promising beginning, Ian Blackie goes through his father Andrew's papers after the Edinburgh man's death from a heart attack. Andrew Blackie had been troubled by the death of his friend Alexander Ballantine, a military man killed by an IRA bomb while boating off the coast of Scotland. Ian finds books advocating home-rule for Scotland, brochures for single-malt whiskly distillers and lists of names followed by cryptic initials. Teaming up with Isobel Ballantine, a romance writer who is the bomb victim's stepdaughter, Ian probes the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two old friends. By the end, coinciding with the Queen's visit to Edinburgh, Grindal has managed to hint at plenty and resolve little. The role of Ian's father in the rise of a lunatic loyalist gang is never made clear, homosexuality is mentioned and then quietly dropped and readers are told more than they may want to know about malt whisky. Ian and Isobel manage finally to hold each other's attention, but not the reader's.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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