Few novels can match Rob Roy for suspense and narrative daring, or in the swirl of colour of its characters. Scott's tour de force of family intrigue has two heroes. Francis Osbaldistone, dispatched in disgrace from London, joins his foxhunting cousins at their ancestral seat in Northumberland. His suspicions of villainous Rashleigh Osbaldistone, and the request of Diana Vernon, the cousin whom Francis loves, draw in Scott's other hero the brave, bitter Highlander and enigmatic outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. Set on the eve of the Jacobite rising of 1715, Rob Roy (1817), in some ways the quintessential English-Scottish encounter, does not give up its secrets until the very last page.