I read Macbeth this year, and one thing I’ve noticed about Shakespeare’s plays is that I forget the plot almost instantly.  I’m not sure why - I don’t have a great memory for books in general, but this is especially bad, even for me. Regardless, I was interested in this re-telling. The introduction introduced it as the historically accurate account of what happened, and who Lady Macbeth really was. That portion was at least interesting, but the love story between Macbeth and Gruoch was ridiculously quick, I didn’t appreciate the jumping timeline (on audiobook there it was not differentiated when the jumps happened and what timeline we were in) and I found myself losing track of what was happening quite often. The setting of medieval Scotland wasn’t as atmospheric as I thought it would be, especially considering McDermid is a Scottish author.  There were a few distasteful bedroom scenes and while the writing wasn’t awful, a novella wasn’t the right format for this story.