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The Daughter of the Loch
Book One of The Blood Remembers Trilogy—an unfolding story of family, folklore, belonging and the secrets of the loch.
Olivia Harper has spent thirty years believing she knows who she is. A DNA test is about to prove otherwise.
An accountant in London with no family and few reasons to question the life she has built, Olivia expects an ancestry test to give her little more than percentages on a screen.
Instead, it gives her a name: Mullikin.
Then a solicitor contacts her with something even harder to explain: a house on the Isle of Skye has been left to her by someone she has never heard of.
Mullikin House should be nothing more than an unexpected inheritance. But from the moment Olivia arrives, Skye feels unsettlingly familiar. There is an old chest she cannot open, a mysterious loch beyond the trees and a strange sense that the house and the land surrounding it, have been waiting for her.
Then there is Callum MacLeod: infuriatingly watchful, impossible to read, and determined to keep her away from the water.
Because there are things about Loch Slapin no one is willing to explain.
Something moves beneath its surface. Something has guarded its secrets for centuries. As Olivia begins to uncover the truth about the family she never knew she had, she discovers that her arrival on Skye may not have been chance at all.
Her past is buried here.
So is a love that refused to die.
And the loch remembers them both.
The Daughter of the Loch is an atmospheric Scottish fantasy of family secrets, folklore, slow-burn romance and the search for belonging, set against the wild landscape of the Isle of Skye.
Olivia Harper has spent thirty years believing she knows who she is. A DNA test is about to prove otherwise.
An accountant in London with no family and few reasons to question the life she has built, Olivia expects an ancestry test to give her little more than percentages on a screen.
Instead, it gives her a name: Mullikin.
Then a solicitor contacts her with something even harder to explain: a house on the Isle of Skye has been left to her by someone she has never heard of.
Mullikin House should be nothing more than an unexpected inheritance. But from the moment Olivia arrives, Skye feels unsettlingly familiar. There is an old chest she cannot open, a mysterious loch beyond the trees and a strange sense that the house and the land surrounding it, have been waiting for her.
Then there is Callum MacLeod: infuriatingly watchful, impossible to read, and determined to keep her away from the water.
Because there are things about Loch Slapin no one is willing to explain.
Something moves beneath its surface. Something has guarded its secrets for centuries. As Olivia begins to uncover the truth about the family she never knew she had, she discovers that her arrival on Skye may not have been chance at all.
Her past is buried here.
So is a love that refused to die.
And the loch remembers them both.
The Daughter of the Loch is an atmospheric Scottish fantasy of family secrets, folklore, slow-burn romance and the search for belonging, set against the wild landscape of the Isle of Skye.
314 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 18, 2026
About the author
Laura Etteridge
1 book1 followerLaura Etteridge is a British author of contemporary folklore fantasy. Her debut novel, The Daughter of the Loch, combines Scottish folklore, family secrets and a search for belonging against the atmospheric landscape of the Isle of Skye.
A lifelong lover of Scotland, genealogy and the stories hidden within family histories, Laura drew on those interests when creating the world of the Olivia and the legends surrounding the loch.
When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found disappearing down a genealogy rabbit hole, planning another trip to Scotland, or reading anything involving folklore, mystery and a touch of the supernatural.
The Daughter of the Loch is the first novel in a planned trilogy.
A lifelong lover of Scotland, genealogy and the stories hidden within family histories, Laura drew on those interests when creating the world of the Olivia and the legends surrounding the loch.
When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found disappearing down a genealogy rabbit hole, planning another trip to Scotland, or reading anything involving folklore, mystery and a touch of the supernatural.
The Daughter of the Loch is the first novel in a planned trilogy.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 27, 2026
Absolutely outstanding Scottish fantasy debut novel. If I could give it six stars I would.
Any spoilers below are only those which anyone reading the free sample would find out for themselves.
A social media post introduced me to this book and I took an appraising look at the free sample, which is always a good place to begin with an unknown book by an unknown author on Amazon, and on the strength of that I said some things like:
===
This prose is well structured; its grammar and spelling are both flawless. That may sound a bit schoolteachery (well, I was one once, but of mathematics, not English; still, I've been called well-read by someone with more than one Cambridge doctorate :D ) but it's a point worth making as it already puts the author ahead of nearly all the field of self-published authors on Amazon. The dross out there is almost beyond belief, but this one gleams like a pearl in the mudbank. That's almost the first essential, and that fence is cleared comfortably.
The plot hook is enticing: who in all the world inherits a free house just like that with a cold call after taking a DNA test? With someone out there waiting for someone to take that test, even? There absolutely *must* be something underlying that and even I, gloomy old curmudgeon that I am, am intrigued to know what.
Not many characters have walked on stage yet and the narrator is well drawn as a rather jaded career woman who seems less than enthralled with her cog-in-a-cold-machine office job. Then there's the gruff guy in the Land Rover who may or may not be the romantic male lead -- the reader will need to go beyond the free sample to find out, but he's exited stage right with a cryptic warning before leaving, and from what I've seen so far of this novel I can't believe that's just space filler.
====
And now, about eighteen hours later, I have blazed through the whole thing with barely a pause for a cup of tea, and well, what can I say?
Firstly that my suspicions were confirmed, and things that I thought were significant most definitely were, and that Laura's lively style remains readable from the first page to the last. I don't even read this kind of genre normally, but I'm not one whit sorry that I made an exception this once.
Secondly that I have not set foot on Skye since the 1980s, when I motorbiked up to Scotland, pitched a cheap tent in a cow pasture behind Isle Ornsay Hotel and explored some narrow byways on this lovely island for which a small Suzuki was just about the ideal vehicle. This book swept me right back there, with the smell of the moist green and the firelight in the bar and the very reasonably-priced whisky being rung up, almost incongruously, in Gaelic on an electronic till. If you've the least acquaintance with the Highlands and Islands, this will recapture the memory like a generous measure of peaty malt with a spoonful of plain water on the side.
Thirdly, this is filed under "fantasy" for an excellent reason, but the reader will get there only marginally faster than the protagonist. And why should she get there any quicker? For the modern city-bred sophisticated woman young enough to be my daughter, the gradual discovery of the ties to Celtic myth and legend older than the Bonnie Prince, older than the Union, older even than Christianity, must necessarily come slowly and in tiny spoonfuls if it is to be swallowed at all. In places the book feels like a gentle Lillian Beckwith country tale (and that's something else I've not visited in more than forty years either, but it stays with you), but from time to time the hint of something vastly older peeps through, and you begin to sense...
What, exactly? I'll not spoil the surprise. Let's just say that the reader may feel as they would have felt if, let's say, The Wicker Man turned out to have, not just Lord Summerisle and his islanders merrily sacrificing an innocent stranger so that the corn would come again, but a genuine ancient harvest god who really would let the corn come -- that the old religion was not merely persisting anachronistically into the Age of Reason, but was actually *true*; at least on this one remote Scottish island.
And I've been scrupulous with that analogy. Nobody will get burned alive in this book. What's going on is completely different. But something absolutely is going on, and this truly outstanding debut author peels off a delicately thin layer of the onion at every turn, and you will come to feel, as the protagonist does, that nothing could have been more natural or inevitable by the time you get to the last page.
There are more books to come. Laura Etteridge has made a strong start with this one. But if it's true, as is often the case, that an author's craft improves as they come to terms with what they can do, how good will the later volumes be?
Any spoilers below are only those which anyone reading the free sample would find out for themselves.
A social media post introduced me to this book and I took an appraising look at the free sample, which is always a good place to begin with an unknown book by an unknown author on Amazon, and on the strength of that I said some things like:
===
This prose is well structured; its grammar and spelling are both flawless. That may sound a bit schoolteachery (well, I was one once, but of mathematics, not English; still, I've been called well-read by someone with more than one Cambridge doctorate :D ) but it's a point worth making as it already puts the author ahead of nearly all the field of self-published authors on Amazon. The dross out there is almost beyond belief, but this one gleams like a pearl in the mudbank. That's almost the first essential, and that fence is cleared comfortably.
The plot hook is enticing: who in all the world inherits a free house just like that with a cold call after taking a DNA test? With someone out there waiting for someone to take that test, even? There absolutely *must* be something underlying that and even I, gloomy old curmudgeon that I am, am intrigued to know what.
Not many characters have walked on stage yet and the narrator is well drawn as a rather jaded career woman who seems less than enthralled with her cog-in-a-cold-machine office job. Then there's the gruff guy in the Land Rover who may or may not be the romantic male lead -- the reader will need to go beyond the free sample to find out, but he's exited stage right with a cryptic warning before leaving, and from what I've seen so far of this novel I can't believe that's just space filler.
====
And now, about eighteen hours later, I have blazed through the whole thing with barely a pause for a cup of tea, and well, what can I say?
Firstly that my suspicions were confirmed, and things that I thought were significant most definitely were, and that Laura's lively style remains readable from the first page to the last. I don't even read this kind of genre normally, but I'm not one whit sorry that I made an exception this once.
Secondly that I have not set foot on Skye since the 1980s, when I motorbiked up to Scotland, pitched a cheap tent in a cow pasture behind Isle Ornsay Hotel and explored some narrow byways on this lovely island for which a small Suzuki was just about the ideal vehicle. This book swept me right back there, with the smell of the moist green and the firelight in the bar and the very reasonably-priced whisky being rung up, almost incongruously, in Gaelic on an electronic till. If you've the least acquaintance with the Highlands and Islands, this will recapture the memory like a generous measure of peaty malt with a spoonful of plain water on the side.
Thirdly, this is filed under "fantasy" for an excellent reason, but the reader will get there only marginally faster than the protagonist. And why should she get there any quicker? For the modern city-bred sophisticated woman young enough to be my daughter, the gradual discovery of the ties to Celtic myth and legend older than the Bonnie Prince, older than the Union, older even than Christianity, must necessarily come slowly and in tiny spoonfuls if it is to be swallowed at all. In places the book feels like a gentle Lillian Beckwith country tale (and that's something else I've not visited in more than forty years either, but it stays with you), but from time to time the hint of something vastly older peeps through, and you begin to sense...
What, exactly? I'll not spoil the surprise. Let's just say that the reader may feel as they would have felt if, let's say, The Wicker Man turned out to have, not just Lord Summerisle and his islanders merrily sacrificing an innocent stranger so that the corn would come again, but a genuine ancient harvest god who really would let the corn come -- that the old religion was not merely persisting anachronistically into the Age of Reason, but was actually *true*; at least on this one remote Scottish island.
And I've been scrupulous with that analogy. Nobody will get burned alive in this book. What's going on is completely different. But something absolutely is going on, and this truly outstanding debut author peels off a delicately thin layer of the onion at every turn, and you will come to feel, as the protagonist does, that nothing could have been more natural or inevitable by the time you get to the last page.
There are more books to come. Laura Etteridge has made a strong start with this one. But if it's true, as is often the case, that an author's craft improves as they come to terms with what they can do, how good will the later volumes be?
September 6, 2026
I will start off saying that the way this book is written beautifully!
Just for me personally it just needed more, the storyline was lacking but this is all my opinion. Others may enjoy the simplicity of it.
I feel with the folklore background it could have had so much potential.
I never learnt much about Olivia the FMC and Callum the MMC.
Duncan the villain, I think there could have been a lot more to his back story and understanding more as to why he turned the way he did.
Just for me personally it just needed more, the storyline was lacking but this is all my opinion. Others may enjoy the simplicity of it.
I feel with the folklore background it could have had so much potential.
I never learnt much about Olivia the FMC and Callum the MMC.
Duncan the villain, I think there could have been a lot more to his back story and understanding more as to why he turned the way he did.
September 30, 2026
I really enjoyed this one. There’s something about the atmosphere of the story that pulled me in, and I liked how the mystery slowly started to unfold. The story kept me curious about what was going to happen next, and the characters made it easy to stay invested. Definitely a book I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys a good mystery with a bit of history and suspense.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews