Fifteen years and five massive novels after the appearance of "Outlander," Diana Gabaldon has produced the sixth novel in her ongoing saga about the tumultuous lives of 18th-century Highlander Jamie Fraser and his 20th-century time-traveling wife, Claire.

Gabaldon originally planned a mere trilogy of novels about the pair, united when Claire passes through a stone circle in 1946 and suddenly finds herself in Scotland just before the infamous Battle of Culloden.

In the newest novel, "A Breath of Snow and Ashes" (Delacorte, 992 pp., $28), the Frasers are homesteading in North Carolina. It's 1772, and Claire, a nurse and healer, knows that in three years will come the shot heard 'round the world. The revolutionary unrest has already spread to Fraser's Ridge.

There is no shortage of action (abductions, murders, betrayals) or sex (those fires have definitely not gone out for Claire and Jamie) in the almost 1,000 pages of Gabaldon's latest installment in the saga.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the author seems to be marking time with "A Breath of Snow and Ashes." We know the war is coming, and there are all sorts of alarms and warnings, but this vast and intricate canvas of a book is all but plotless.

After having followed Jamie and Claire through a whirlwind of mayhem in the earlier books, we now live with them in a gritty frontier life that sometimes offers more details than one might wish (such as a lengthy description of hemorrhoids and their treatment).

Claire's prescience and her medical skills dominate the book, with medical case after case awaiting her diagnosis and dispatch, from hookworms to Dupuytren's contracture. Together with her time-traveling daughter Brianna, she creates and uses matches, syringes, penicillin, ether, shovels and pipes for plumbing, among many other innovations.

Author appearance


Diana Gabaldon will read from "A Breath of Snow and Ashes" at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at Third Place Books,

17171 Bothell Way N.E., Lake Forest Park; free (206-366-3333; www.thirdplacebooks.com).

Hanging over everyone's head is an item from a future 1776 issue of "The Wilmington Gazette," announcing the death by fire of all the Frasers.

Will this really happen? We're not spoiling the ending of "A Breath of Snow and Ashes" for you, but it may help to know that there are reports of a seventh book in the series, yet to come.

Melinda Bargreen is the classical-music

critic for The Seattle Times.