The Black Douglas

This story of life in Scotland, during the 1400s focuses on the simple things: unrequited love, true love blocked by circumstance, arrogant ambition, and unbounded jealousy, all accompanied by vengeful feuding between individuals and clans who'd made themselves masters of the struggle for revenge. S.R. Crockett was a tremendously popular novelist back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now, barely a hundred years later, he's much less widely known. The Black Douglas revolves around a cast of actual historical figures, including William Sixth Earl of Douglas, and Gilles de Retz, the loopy French nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc before embarking on a life of occult rituals and murder most vile. The story unfolds against a backdrop of mediaeval Scotland and France and is frequently told through the eyes of the Earl's sidekick and knight, Sholto MacKim. Don't be fooled into thinking this book is another historical romance of the kind churned out by contemporary Scottish writers. It couldn't be further from that description. Yes, a romantic thread runs through the novel, but so also do political intrigue, bloody executions, terrifying witchcraft and sorcery