My Heart Stood Still

By Lynn Kurland

Thomas McKinnon is a very successful businessman and when he is asked to renovate an old keep in the north of England he agrees. It's the kind of challenge he enjoys and he is rich enough that he doesn't need to work. So as a fun break from the ordinary he sets up his base at an inn in the nearby village and proceeds to take a look at the project.
McKinnon is of Scottish ancestry and is somewhat psychic. Before he even left the US to head over to England, he was seeing a Scottish-looking apparition occasionally. So perhaps he wasn't too startled to find that the old, abandoned keep was the home of several ghosts, most of them Scottish. But the one that caught his eye was the beautiful ghost of a young Scottish woman who was murdered at the keep centuries ago. The ghost of Iolanthe MacLeod has been haunting the keep since she was killed there and her haunting is the reason the keep was abandoned centuries ago and left to crumble into ruin.
As Thomas gets to know Iolanthe and learns her tragic story he finds himself falling in love with a dead woman. He also develops quite a friendship with some of Iolanthe's ghostly attendants. Delving more deeply into her history, he becomes convinced that there is a way he can travel back in time, prevent the murder, and hopefully have a life with the flesh and blood woman from the past to whom he is a total stranger.

This was a pretty good story if you can get past some of the fantasy elements. Like the TWILIGHT vampires, the spirits in this story are not the traditional type, being a lot more interactive. In fact, they are more like living people, eating and drinking, changing clothes, growing a garden, chatting and making small talk just like they were alive. In fact, if you didn't try to touch them, you wouldn't be able to tell they were ghosts. So that was a bit different. Also, the time travel thing was made to seem like there is a time slip behind every bush. But never mind, it is still a pretty good story about a man trying to rescue a woman from a terrible fate and then when she is rescued, trying to convince her that he is the man of her dreams and that they belong together several hundred years into the future, which is a bit of a tall order. It was a pretty fun and interesting read.