Books: Tragedy in Tartan

TUNES OF GLORY (211 pp.)—James Kennaway—Harper ($3).

As anyone knows who has ever been blackjacked on the vulnerable emotions by a Highland piper, the Scots have a talent for misery second only to that of the Irish themselves.

This first novel by Scots Author James Kennaway is a tartan tragedy with comic and eerie overtones like drunken laughter heard through a mist and haunting as the sound of army boots on wet cobbles.

In icy barracks somewhere in Scotland's dour landscape, a battalion of Highlanders is waging a pretty grim peace under the command of Colonel Jock Sinclair.

Jock had bravely led the battalion in...

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