Bone Rattler

Aboard a British convict ship bound for the New World, Duncan McCallum witnesses a series of murders and seeming suicides among his fellow Scottish prisoners that thrusts him into the bloody maw of the French and Indian War. As the only man aboard with any medical training, Duncan is ordered to assemble evidence to hold another prisoner accountable for the deaths--or face a lethal punishment. His conclusions--based on the cryptic, ceremonial nature of the killings--suggest that the wave of violence is somehow linked to the savages of the American wilderness. Duncan's suspicions that the prison company is to be sacrificed in the war seem to be confirmed when he learns that they are all indentured to Lord Ramsey's estate in the uncharted New York woodlands, a Heart of Darkness where multiple warring factions--the British, rogue Scots, the French, the Huron, and the Iroquois--are engaged in physical, psychological, and spiritual battle. Following a strange trail of clues that seem half Iroquois and half Highland Scot, mesmerized by Lord Ramsey's beautiful daughter--who has a forbidden knowledge of heathen ways--and frequently defying death in a dangerous wilderness populated by grizzled European settlers, mysterious scalping parties, and Indian sorcerers, Duncan McCallum, exiled chief of his near-extinct clan, finds the source of all evil at the site of an Indian massacre.