The Fiery Cross

North Carolina backcountry, 1770 to 1772. Jamie Fraser, a Highlander who has become a colonial landholder, presides over the Scottish immigrants settled on his land grant, Fraser's Ridge. He is something close to a laird, and the royal governor now asks him to raise a militia against the Regulators, who are rebelling over taxes and corruption.

His wife Claire, a physician born in the twentieth century, knows what the coming war will cost. What she cannot settle is how much of that knowledge she can safely share, and with whom.

Their daughter Brianna and her husband Roger MacKenzie are making a life of their own. Meanwhile the pursuit of the smuggler Stephen Bonnet carries forward threads left open by the previous book.

This is the fifth novel in the Outlander series, a historical saga with a time-travel thread. It runs long and carries a large cast of family, tenants and neighbours, so the pace is unhurried and the canvas crowded. It suits readers already invested in the Frasers more than anyone starting the series cold.