The Tartan Conspiracy

The tension diminishes disappointingly as the action intensifies in Grindal's ( Over the Sea to Die ) espionage thriller. In the promising beginning, Ian Blackie goes through his father Andrew's papers after the Edinburgh man's death from a heart attack. Andrew Blackie had been troubled by the death of his friend Alexander Ballantine, a military man killed by an IRA bomb while boating off the coast of Scotland. Ian finds books advocating home-rule for Scotland, brochures for single-malt whiskly distillers and lists of names followed by cryptic initials. Teaming up with Isobel Ballantine, a romance writer who is the bomb victim's stepdaughter, Ian probes the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two old friends. By the end, coinciding with the Queen's visit to Edinburgh, Grindal has managed to hint at plenty and resolve little. The role of Ian's father in the rise of a lunatic loyalist gang is never made clear, homosexuality is mentioned and then quietly dropped and readers are told more than they may want to know about malt whisky. Ian and Isobel manage finally to hold each other's attention, but not the reader's. (Jan.)