Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Of haggis, gigged frogs and succubi: Continuing her Outlander series, Gabaldon (An Echo in the Bone, 2009, etc.) again pushes the boundaries of genre fiction.Sensitive readers new to the series will want to know that Gabaldons leads are fond of dropping f-bombs, sometimes even in the clinical sense: Damn you, neither one of us was making love to the otherwe were both fuckingyou!" Theyll also want to know that, as those characters cross time and space, theyre given to the basest treacheries as well as the profoundest loyalties, which may help explain the preceding quotation. The action now takes place across the water in revolutionary America, where Jamie Fraser, one-time Jacobite rebel, now commands 10 companies of Continental militia, when, he worriedly notes, hed never led a band of more than fifty. Lord John, his old Brit friend and sometime bugaboo, figures in the mischief, of course. There are twists aplenty, one of them Jamies Lazarus-like return from the great beyond to findwell, different domestic arrangements. Meanwhile, his child, having long since learned that its possible to enter a time vortex with a gemstone and come out safely in other eras, now has good reason to want to be not in the 20th century but back in the 18th, where, if things are just as complicated, she at least has trustworthy kin. Confused yet? With willingly suspended disbelief, it all makes sense in the end. Gabaldons themes are decidedly grown-up, as the in-joking chapter titles (Frottage, Frannies Frenulum) suggest, but the basic premise is a dash of juvenile fantasy, a jigger of historical fact and heaping helpings of counterfactuals. If youre a Gabaldon fan, the Scottish dialect, laid on with a spade, and all those naughty asides will be a familiar pleasure. If notwell, this overly long book isnt likely to make converts, at least not without several thousand pages of catch-up to figure out whos who, whos doing what, whos doing whom, and why.Gabaldon works a successful formula, with few surprises but plenty of devices. And yes, theres room for a sequelor 10. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.