For some reason, I was determined to finish this book even though I found it to be tediously boring. It is, above all, overlong. There were long stretches that were repetitive (at best), or confusing (at worst), and other bits that should have been fleshed out (I was dismayed, for example, by Claire's utter lack of analysis about what it was like to find herself suddenly in a time centuries before her own... The only in-depth look at her position and its implications was delivered in a sort of Dostoevskian monologue by a monk in the last moments of book. I guess the author had to fit it in somewhere). 
 Maybe glorified romance with a Scottish accent (counterbalanced by barely-readable scenes of sodomy and torture) is titillating for some, but this book just wasn't for me. I went into it eager to read "outside my genre," and left nonplussed (if not resentful) for having wasted so much time on what was little more than swashbuckling trash.