In Dundas' assured hands, one man's search for answers makes for a lyrical, riveting meditation on memory.--EW One man knows the connection between two extraordinary acts of arson, fifteen years apart, in his Montana hometown--if only he could remember it. Having lost much of his memory from a traumatic brain injury sustained in Iraq, army veteran Matthew Rose is called back to Montana after his father's death to settle his affairs, and hopefully to settle the past as well. It's not only a blank to him, but a mystery. Why as a teen did he suddenly become sullen and vacant, abandoning the activities and people that had meant most to him? How did he, the son of hippy activists, wind up enlisting in the first place? Then on his first night back, Matthew sees a house go up in flames, and it turns out a local college student has died inside. And this event sparks a memory of a different fire, an unsolved crime from long ago, a part of Matthew's past that might lead to all the answers he's been searching for. What he finds will connect the old fire and the new, a series of long-unsolved mysteries, and a ruthless act of murder.

This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date biography of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811) and his son Robert, 2nd Viscount Melville (1771-1851). Aided by other members of their family, they ruled Scotland from the 1770s to the 1830s in a period of government later dubbed 'the Dundas Despotism'. Using a mass of new primary and secondary material culled from England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States, Michael Fry here challenges the traditional view that theirs was a corrupt and authoritarian regime. He shows that both father and son sought to achieve good government within the accepted political conventions of the age, and that many of the principles they set out to apply were owed directly to Scottish Enlightenment ideas. The Dundases were also of fundamental importance in drawing Scotland more fully into the United Kingdom and enabling the Union of 1707 to work. This is a sparkling reassessment of a crucial period of Scottish, British and imperial history. The Dundas Despotism was previously published by Edinburgh University Press.