The tartan conspiracy - Hardcover

Richard Grindal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333587197 ISBN 13: 9780333587195

Publisher: Macmillan, 1992

Synopsis

Richard Grindal is able to evoke the rough and dangerous beauty of his native Scotland as few suspense writers can. In The Tartan Conspiracy Grindal has created a taut, realistic thriller, with the Scottish Highlands as the starting point for IRA-fueled international intrigue.
Ian Blackie's discovery of some documents and newspaper clippings in a trunk in his father's attic leads him to investigate further the death of his father's old school friend General Alexander Ballantine. Ian's tug on this loose thread of his father's life begins to unravel a complex series of IRA plots, culminating in a race-against-assassination finish reminiscent of Day of the Jackal.
After the intensely disquieting small-town mysteries of Over the Sea to Die, Grindal has returned with a broader novel of espionage, danger, and personal vengeance.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0333587197
• ISBN 13: 9780333587195
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224