Ransom

Ransom is a historical romance by the American writer Julie Garwood, published in 1999 by Pocket Books. It is the second of three novels about the lairds of the Scottish Highlands.

The book is set in England and Scotland in the years after the death of Richard the Lionheart, when the border was not yet firmly settled. Gillian was a child when Baron Alford raided her home, killed her father and took her sister away, and she has spent the years since trying to find out what became of the girl. Her search brings her into the company of Ramsey Sinclair and Brodick Buchanan, two Scottish lairds whose claims and feuds are entangled with her family's, and the relationship that develops between Gillian and the man who takes her becomes the centre of the book, with loyalty and justice worked out alongside it.

Garwood wrote more than two dozen novels, most of them historical romances, and the settings of the Highlands and of Regency England recur throughout them. Her books are built around the couple rather than around the battles, and the politics of the period provide the pressure they have to work under.