Not until the Romans arrive, 400 pages into the book, does the real action begin. And those looking for blood-soaked battlefield mayhem will be disappointed. The plot, however, needs tightening it bogs down in too many soap-opera subplots about shocking betrayals. Tribal life and Roman politics are well depicted, and there is no shortage of juicy love triangles in all kinds of exotic configurations.

They fight Caradoc's evil brother, Amminios, who is allied with the Romans and whose treachery makes him a formidable foe.

Breaca meets Caradoc, warrior son of a rival king, and the two develop both a romantic relationship and a battlefield camaraderie that will be sorely tested over the decade. Violent feuds, territorial rivalries, shifting alliances and desire for plunder made Britain a bloody patchwork of warring tribal lands, but invasion by the Romans gave the tribes a common enemy. Breaca's tribe, the Eceni, had both men and women as warriors, healers and elders. Scott has turned in the opening novel to a trilogy that bodes to join the ranks of Mary Stewart, Edith Pargeter and Sharon Kay Penman in historical re-imagining, and of a quality that other novelists, such as Morgan Llywelyn, Judith Tarr and Guy Gavriel Kay aspire to but to date have failed to entirely achieve. Many of the tribes in Britain were either ruled by women or held men and women as equals. 32 to 43 and covers Boudica's youth (when she was known as Breaca), during which she kills her first opponent in battle and begins a life of leadership and bloodshed. Long on meticulous detail and religious spells, and short on suspense and battle action, this lengthy volume runs from A.D. Scottish writer Scott has already turned out three crime novels, but this is her debut historical fiction, the first in an ambitious trilogy about the life of Boudica, the warrior queen of Britannia who fought the Romans in the first century A.D.

Boudica dreaming the eagle