Love Beyond Time (Morna's Legacy #1)

TIME TRAVEL:  Brielle Montgomery's archeologist mother interrupts her blind date to take her to Scotland, the site of her first famous dig - a 400 year-old mystery.  The powerful Conell clan was wiped out, and no one knows why.  In 1645, Eoin Conell was forced to marry a harpy named Blaire, and re-agreed to it at his father’s deathbed. What no one knows is that 30 years earlier, Eoin’s late aunt cast a spell to save her clan from destruction by forcing both women into moving to each other’s times. But can a kindergarten teacher really save a Scottish clan?

Unlike many Historicals that are set in Scotland, Ms. Claire does not waste many words on describing the country, but gets right to the point.  She teases the reader’s memory by placing the characters into the lush background. Each of the players in the game are at once both modern and medieval, a difficult thing to fully achieve when writing a time travel romance.  While Bri and Blaire definitely belong to the time they are born, they  also have traits perfectly suited to handle the exchanging of centuries.  The reader does not come away feeling as if either of them were “stolen” from her time. Unfortunately the use of only one character in the first person and everyone else in the third is very off-putting. Even with flipping between times and characters, the course of the mystery never wavers once, pulling the reader in, leaving one happily satisfied but  ready to take on the journey again with those who did not get a happy ending!

Julie York