This one was another for book club, and I have to say that when I finished it I shut the book with a snap and said “That’s it?!”

Here be spoilers.

This is the story of Mary Boulton, the young widow who killed her husband. That we know from the outset, as Adamson tells us this as we are introduced to the fleeing Mary. Or, as Adamson constantly refers to her, “The Widow”. As if the two frightening brothers-in-law aren’t enough to remind us of her past, this moniker is necessary as well. Don’t forget, dear reader, that Mary killed her husband.

Why does Mary kill her husband? I’m not sure if Adamson intended that to be a mystery, but if so, it was a wholly unsatisfying one. And if it wasn’t meant to be a mystery, and Mary’s reasoning behind her act was meant to be obvious and sympathetic, well, Adamson doesn’t succeed with that either. Finally if it’s meant to be an illustration of her madness, perhaps he shouldn’t have told us she was half-mad on the first page.

Really, I suspect Mary killed her husband so that the author would have something to keep her running.

And run she does. For several hundred pages of drawn out, boring description. The Outlander can be seen as both Mary’s story and the story of those who come to assist her on her journey, and frankly I cared more for her angels than for the widow herself. There just wasn’t a whole lot there.

Not in terms of characterisation, anyway. In terms of mind-blowingly detailed (boring) description, well, there was more than sufficient amounts of that. In fact, I wouldn’t say I read this book so much as I skimmed it for actual plot.

I almost dropped it halfway, but was spurred on by the question of those two scary brothers-in-law who are relentless in their pursuit of Mary. Do they ever find her? That was what kept me going until the rather predictable end.

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