{Review} Highland Guard Series @monicamccarty

What’s sexier than a man in a kilt? How about Special Ops in kilts. The Highland Guard series marries Monica’s love of strapping, sexy Highland warriors with her other love for navy SEALs and black ops. Think Suzanne Brockmann meets Braveheart.

Where the legend of the Highlander began... Journey back to the time of Braveheart, when Scotland was fighting to free itself from English tyranny, and Robert the Bruce was fighting for a crown. To defeat the superior forces of the heavy mounted English knights, Bruce knows he needs a new kind of warrior. He looks to the barbarian lands, to the most feared warriors in Christendom, to the ultimate guerilla fighter... to the Highlander.

Scouring the darkest corners of the Highlands and Western Isles, Bruce handpicks eleven warriors to form a secret elite fighting force like the world has never seen. They are the ultimate “Special Forces,” the best of the best, chosen for their superior skills in each discipline of warfare and brought together into one elite fighting force known as the HIGHLAND GUARD. Bound together in a secret ceremony, they are a phantom force, identifiable only by their extraordinary skills, their war names, and the lion rampant tattooed on their arm.

Vowing death before surrender, Bruce’s band of shadow warriors will stop at nothing but invincible warriors will face the one thing they can’t defeat: love, and the remarkable women who claim their hearts.

About this author

What do you get when you mix a legal career, a baseball career, motherhood, and a love of history with a voracious reader? In my case, a Historical Romance Author.

Like most writers, I’ve always loved to read. Growing up in California there was always plenty to do outside, but all too often I could be found inside curled up with a book (or two or three). I started with the usual fare: The Little House on the Prairie series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Watership Down, Nancy Drew, and everything by Judy Blume. Once I cleared off my bookshelf, I started swiping books from my mom. Some, like Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight, probably weren’t the most appropriate choice for a pre-adolescent—although they were definitely illuminating. I can still remember the look of abject horror on my mom’s Catholic-girl-face when I asked her what a virgin was. After that rather brief conversation, she paid a little closer attention to what had disappeared off her book shelf, and steered me in the direction of Harlequin and Barbara Cartland romances. I was hooked. I quickly read through the inventory of the local library and was soon buying bags of romances at garage sales.

In high school, with the encouragement of my father (who I think was a little concerned about the steady diet of romances), I read over eighty of the Franklin Library’s One Hundred Greatest Books ever written—including Tolstoy, Confucius, Plato, and the entire works of Shakespeare. Some of them were tough going for a teenager, but the experience would prove an invaluable foundation for college. After reading War and Peace, I wasn’t easily intimidated.

For some reason Monica decided to go into writing and not fashion.

After graduation, I loaded up the VW (Jetta not Bus) and trekked down I-5 to attend the University of Southern California, majoring in Political Science and minoring in English (see why all that reading helped!). I joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, and when I wasn’t studying or at football games, did my best to support the local bartending industry. Ah, the good old days.

With that kind of fun, four years of college wasn’t quite enough. So leaving Tommy Trojan behind, I traveled back up north to Palo Alto for three more years of study at Stanford Law School. Once I survived the stress of the first semester, law school proved to be one of the best times of my life—garnering me a JD, life-long friends, a husband, and an unexpectedly intimate knowledge of baseball. (See “The Baseball Odyssey” below).

Law School was also where I fell in love with Scotland. In my third year, I took a Comparative Legal History class, and wrote a paper on the Scottish Clan System and Feudalism. So I immediately dropped out of law school and went on to write Scottish Historical Romances…well no, not quite. You see, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer, I was a “poet” (i.e., not into math), and I love to argue. It seemed natural.

So I finished law school, got married, passed the CA bar, moved to Minnesota (with a few stops along the way), waived into the MN bar, worked as a litigator for a few satisfying years, moved back to CA, had a couple of kids, realized that a legal career and being a single parent for most of the year (due to husband's career) would be extremely difficult, and THEN decided to sit down and write.

And how did I end up writing romance? It’s not as divergent as it seems. What I loved about being a lawyer are the same things I love about being a writer—research and writing. The only thing missing is the arguing, but that’s what a husband and kids are for, right?

Decided to review this series as a whole.  This series was amazing! Sexy, Sensual, and just plan yummy! I loved the fact that these are filled with history!  I love it when an author explains things to the reader and it makes me feel that I am really in that time!  Cant wait for more from this author!

"*I received a copy of this book for free to review, this in no way influenced my review, all opinions are 100% honest and my own." Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.