The Piper

by Charles Todd

First published 2017

Amazon

4.1(1,458)

Before the Great War, Hamish MacLeod lives quietly as a shepherd in the Scottish Highlands. During a storm he rescues an injured young piper near the loch, only for the boy to vanish and later be found dead. Hamish’s attempt to identify him reveals evasions among neighbours who prefer an unexplained death to scrutiny of their own relationships.

The novella gives an independent life to the man who will later haunt Ian Rutledge. Its remote glen is governed by reputation, kinship and economic dependence rather than formal authority, and Hamish’s insistence on truth marks the moral character Rutledge remembers after the battlefield execution. The knowledge of his future lends the small pre-war mystery a tragic weight.