After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray Is left for dead on the battlefield. Severely wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades.Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands under British rule, Iain keeps a bookshop in Inverness. One day a stranger enters. He is searching for something but refuses to say what. Eventually he leaves when Iain locks up for the night.Next morning Iain finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon beside him — a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for — and paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.