Martin MacDowall

Eilid* Stuart is tall, blond with laser-like blue eyes, deadly with a rifle and, at 21, is the only female deer stalker in Scotland. In January of 1959 she witnesses an airplane crash in a snowstorm in a remote part of Glen Torridon. She rescues an infant boy, the sole survivor, who is returning with his mother to Los Angeles having gone through a serious heart operation carried out by a famous London surgeon. Believing the child is orphaned, and because of her unfortunate relationships with men, she decides to “acquire” the child and raise him as her own.

Aided and abetted by her uncle, a General Practitioner who lives near Pitlochry, she names the child Charles Edward Stuart after the young pretender of that name. And so Jens Ericsson the twin son of ‘Red’ Ericsson an American oilman disappears and is presumed to have perished in the crash. ‘Red’ Ericsson becomes a grieving father and is left to raise his remaining son in Houston, Texas. He never remarries and builds a Petrochemical empire in Houston.

Thirty-four years later a photograph in a Scottish newspaper is sent to him by a friend who is struck by the similarity of the leader of the new Scottish Republican Party, a certain Charles Stuart and Lance Ericsson Red’s remaining twin son. Suddenly Ericsson is given a glimmer of hope that the son he thought dead might still be alive. He hires a Scottish ex-patriot private detective to investigate.

eilid* gaelic for a hind (doe-female deer)