The Piper of Blackstone Moor

From the Book Jacket:

There are some songs the heart never forgets.

Five years after the death of his wife, acclaimed piper Callum Fraser has lost his music.

Unable to perform and unwilling to face the life he left behind, he retreats to the only place that still feels familiar—the remote Highland village of Blackstone Moor, where generations of his family have lived beneath windswept skies and ancient hills.

The village has changed.

The old inn is struggling.

The harbor stands quieter than he remembers.

And the girl he once knew has become a woman he barely recognizes.

Isla MacLeod never expected Callum Fraser to return home.

Not after he left.

Not after the life he built elsewhere.

As The wind off the Atlantic did not care about grief. It swept over the jagged lip of Blackstone Moor just as it had when Callum was a boy, carrying the bitter scent of brine, damp earth, and decaying heather. It cut straight through the wool of his coat, a sharp, unyielding reminder that he was finally standing on the soil he had spent half a decade trying to forget.

As Blackstone Moor prepares for its annual midsummer festival, Callum finds himself drawn back into village life—and increasingly unable to ignore the woman who sees through every carefully constructed wall.

But some wounds run deeper than either of them imagined.

And when long-buried family secrets come to light, Callum must decide whether the music he lost is truly gone forever... or whether love still has one final song left to play.

Set amid the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands, The Piper of Blackstone Moor is a breathtaking story of healing, forgiveness, and the courage to begin again.

From bestselling author Ethan Blackwood comes an unforgettable romance about finding your way home.

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Sample Chapter:

Below the ridge, the village of Blackstone nestled into the shoreline like a scattering of gray stones. The hearth fires were just beginning to track thin ribbons of smoke into the darkening sky, but Callum kept his back to them. He couldn’t go down there yet. Not until he had faced the ghost in his hands.

With fingers that felt heavy and disconnected from his bones, Callum unbuckled the worn leather case. The pipes inside smelled of beeswax, aged wood, and a faint, lingering trace of the lavender drying-pouches Sarah used to tuck into the velvet lining. The scent alone hit him like a physical blow, knocking the breath from his lungs.

He lifted the instrument, the dark African blackwood cold against his palm. For three hundred years, a Fraser had played the evening gather on this very ridge. His father, his grandfather, stretching back into the mist of the Jacobite dead. The music was supposed to be in his blood, an instinct as natural as breathing.

He fit the blowpipe to his lips and filled the bag, his chest tightening with a sudden, suffocating panic. He brought his fingers down onto the chanter, feeling the familiar notches in the wood. He closed his eyes, searching the quiet spaces of his mind for the opening notes of The Mist on the Brae—the song he had played at his wedding, the song he had played at her bedside when the fever took the last of her breath.

He blew. He pressed the bag beneath his arm.

The sound that emerged was not music. It was a choked, fractured wail—a terrible, discordant screech that tore through the heavy silence of the moor before dying abruptly in the wind. The drones rattled and went dead.

Callum lowered the pipes, his hands trembling violently. The silence of the moor returned, heavier now, mocking him. The air was right. The instrument was perfect. But the well inside him was dry, choked with ash and old stones.