Customer Reviews

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

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First Sentence: The younger of the two shires rifled the man's pockets with expert fingers.

Young Alexander Seaton, disallowed from becoming a minister, is now a teacher in his town of Banff, Scotland. He sees a man who staggers and falls on the street during a dark, wet night, but doesn't stop to help.

With morning comes the revelation that the man was the apprentice to the town apothecary and nephew to the town proctor. He had also been poisoned and found dead in Alexander's classroom. Alexander's friend, Charles Thom, who has also been living with the apothecary, is arrested for the murder. It falls to Alexander to prove his friend's innocence.

There was so much to this book, it's hard to know where to begin. Though it's not necessary indicative of excellent writing, I thought it interesting that Ms. MacLean is the niece to author Alistair MacLean (Guns of Navarone). Both MacLeans excel at bringing the reader into the story. From there, they are vastly different.

Ms. McLean makes real life in 1626 Scotland; the time of Charles I, after the dissolution and separation from Rome, but during a time of Knox and Melville Presbyterianism, religious prejudice and the rise of witch hunts. It's a story of murder, ambition, fear and bigotry, but also of strength, goodness and that we never truly know how we are perceived by others.

Alexander is a wonderful protagonist who becomes very real as his story unfolds throughout the story. A cast of characters would have been helpful, in the beginning, but all the characters are fully dimensional so it quickly became a non-issue. I did appreciate the short glossary at the end.

The story is dense and rich with detail and emotion, compassion and suspense. There was never a point where I wasn't compelled to turn the page and read more. It's a powerfully evocative book with wonderful historic detail that never overshadows an engrossing story.

I should love for this to be the first of a series. Even if it's not, I shall definitely read whatever Ms. MacLean writes next.

There was much to enjoy about this mystery, I especially liked the main character. Alexander Seaton is a man ashamed of his misdeeds and still harshly judged by his disgrace. In the tight knit Scottish community where he is a school master he has very few friends. The one person he counts closest to him, Charles Thom, has been arrested and charged with murder. The corpse of the apothecary's apprentice, Patrick Davidson, was found in a classroom in Alexander's house. Thom's romantic feelings for the apothecary's daughter and her interest in Davidson are thought to be the motivation for the crime. Alexander and his friend Dr James Jaffray vow to prove Charles Thom's innocence.

I enjoyed the details of the tight-knit community of Banff, Scotland, the relationships that connect the people, the politics and religious views that shape those relationships and the harsh system of justice that is employed.

MacLean did an excellent job of creating interesting and realistic characters I particularly liked the growth and change that Alexander experiences during and after his search to uncover the truth about Patrick Davidson's murder. I also liked the way the author slowly revealed the cause of Seaton's fall from grace.

There is a spiritual thread woven into this story, I did not find it not overly religious or offensive, rather it was logical and fit within the context of the story. I would give the religious thread the atheist stamp of approval and wager that not many readers would be offended by it.

The reason I found the reading experience more enjoyable than my reflection on it after I was done is that the mystery itself had two elements that I didn't find realistic or convincing and both of them were integral to the murder. One is revealed in the beginning of the story and the other at the end. I continued to wonder about the first as I was reading; it nagged at me but didn't spoil my enjoyment of all the wonderful things the author threaded through her story. The element that occurred at the end of the story was revealed during the dénouement not the climax so again it didn't detract from the unveiling of the guilty party or even of the motivation for the murder itself. However, the more I thought about that second element the more disappointed I was by it.

Overall I found this to be an enjoyable and entertaining story with compelling characters and interesting period details. I think fans of historical fiction would enjoy this novel and not be bothered at all or maybe even notice the issues that I had a problem with.

Alexander Seaton is a very bitter young man. An intelligent scholar and gifted preacher, he was on the verge of achieving his life's goal - ordination as a minister - when he did something that earned him the enmity of the man who had previously been his benefactor. Depressed and humiliated, he managed to compound his sin, then went on a six-month bender that succeeded in alienating the friends he had left. Only a stalwart few stood by him, and it's with these two men we find him drinking in a tavern as the book opens.

Eventually his friends go about their business, but Alexander has a few more tankards before he heads for home. On his way, he sees a man staggering on the other side of the road. With only a moment's hesitation, he reasons that he's gotten himself home in worse condition, that fellow can as well. But the next morning he finds that fellow laid out across his desk in his schoolroom, dead of poison.

The realization that he walked away from a dying man affects Alexander deeply. The fact that one of his friends is charged with the murder just adds to his commitment to find justice for the murdered man. Papist plots, witch hunts, council politics and other details of Scotland in the 1620s make for a wonderful tale as, at the core of it, Alexander slowly realizes that what he's been calling shame is really self-pity and everything is not always about him.

The cover of some versions say "a novel in the style of C.J.Sansom" and there is a similarity of descriptive style, but I found Alexander more immediately engaging and accessible than Shardlake (I really didn't warm to Matthew until book 2). All the clues to the mystery were well laid-out, but I was enjoying the story too much to pay much attention to them so I didn't guess the culprit until very near the end. Maclean lets Alexander's self-loathing get just to the edge of truly annoying but has his friends shake him out of it in the nick of time.

A word about the audio. It's narrated by Crawford Logan, someone I haven't heard before but will definitely look for again. He's a bit too old and confident sounding for the 26 year old, depressed Alexander - I suspect the constant self-deprecation would have gotten on my nerves much more if I were reading. But it's worth that slight quibble for his narration of the witch hunt scene, which is marvelously riveting.