Every human existence has a purpose: to cure a disease, to explore where no one has gone before, to create a great piece of literature or to raise a child. For many that purpose may not make itself known until the end, until the life can be looked at as a whole. Through the journey, the search for purpose, there are the ups and downs, celebrations and sorrows. There is the life that happens along the way. The Fiery Cross, the fifth in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, is a chronicle of lives, a story of what happens to them in the journey to find their purpose.

Like the old time serials produced in the thirties and forties, The Fiery Cross picks up the story left in Drums of Autumn the very next morning. The group from Fraser's Ridge are still at the Gathering, making preparations for the wedding of Brianna and Roger. The appearance of British soldiers signals the beginning of the long conflict that will eventually lead to the birth of a nation. Jamie Fraser's position as land baron and his legacy as Scottish Highlander, put him in the middle of the conflict, pulled in both directions. To his kinsmen, many of whom are deeply entrenched with the growing number of revolutionaries, he owes allegiance by birth. To the British Governor Tryon, he owes allegiance by circumstance. Walking a line imposed by necessity, Jamie gathers to him forty men, forming a militia in the service of Governor and King George.

Thanks to his twentieth-century born, time traveling wife Claire, Jamie is armed with knowledge and he's prepared to make the leap to the side of the colonists, the side he knows will, one day, be victorious. To jump too soon would be to bring the wrath of the British down upon them while they still have the power to take away his lands and demolish the new life the Fraser family is building. To wait too long would bring down suspicion and exclusion from those who took a stand at the onset. Preparing for the specters of the future, Claire, Jamie and all their people are haunted by the ghosts of the past. The effects of Stephen Bonnet's rape of Brianna are especially poignant; her difficulty with sexual intimacy, her father's obsession with revenge and Roger's constant worry and curiosity as to whether Brianna's son is his as well, all take their toll on the lives on the Ridge.

The Fiery Cross is much slower paced and not nearly as plot driven as the previous Outlander episodes. It can be a bit of a disappointment for, on a comparative level, it doesn't have the jaw-dropping surprises and revelations expected from Ms. Gabaldon. The main plot line is fuzzy and hard to follow, a multi branched, overgrown path in the woods that has gone unused for many years. It's hard to tell which path to take, what the purpose is, until the end. The last few chapters bring on the white-knuckled, furious page turning once more, not only with stunning story shifts and tantalizing twists, but by provocatively arousing the need for more.

Reviewed by Donna Russo Morin
© September 2005