Written in My Own Heart's Blood recap

Philadelphia, June 1778. Jamie Fraser, reported drowned, walks in to find Claire married to Lord John Grey and his natural son William newly told who his father is. Everything comes apart at once: William repudiates his name and rides off, Lord John is taken prisoner, and the British army evacuates the city with Washington's army after it. Jamie takes a Continental command; Claire is shot and nearly dies, and is still convalescing when the two armies meet at Monmouth Court House in punishing heat and fight to a bloody draw that the Americans count a victory. Afterwards Jamie resigns his commission. William, adrift, tries and fails to save a young woman named Jane from the gallows and takes her small sister into his keeping. In the twentieth century Brianna hunts down the man who took her son, recovers Jem, and takes both children through the stones after Roger, who has been stranded in the Highlands two centuries early with William Buccleigh MacKenzie. The families converge: the MacKenzies are reunited in the past, Young Ian marries Rachel Hunter, and Jamie and Claire go home to Fraser's Ridge to rebuild.

Claire Randall walked through a Highland stone circle in 1945 and came out two hundred years earlier, married James Fraser to survive there, and was sent back through the stones pregnant on the eve of Culloden. She returned to the past for good twenty years later, and after smuggling, shipwreck and the Caribbean they settled in North Carolina and founded Fraser's Ridge. Their daughter Brianna followed, as did Roger MacKenzie, who married her. Jamie also has a son he has never claimed: William, born to Geneva Dunsany and raised as the heir to an earldom by Jamie's friend Lord John Grey, who has kept the secret for eighteen years. In the last two books the Ridge came apart and the Revolution swallowed the family. Roger and Brianna took their children back to the twentieth century to save their daughter's heart; the Frasers' house burned; Jamie, Claire and Young Ian went to Scotland and buried Jamie's brother-in-law at Lallybroch, and Jamie's sister Jenny came back with them. On the return crossing Jamie was reported drowned. Claire reached British-occupied Philadelphia a widow and Lord John married her to keep her from arrest; within a day William discovered his parentage and stormed out, and Jamie, alive, walked in on the pair of them. In 1980 Scotland, Jem was abducted by a man named Rob Cameron and Roger went through the stones after him, landing in the wrong century.

Philadelphia, June 1778, and everything happens at once. Jamie is alive, Claire is married to Lord John Grey, and William has just been told whose son he is. William breaks with his stepfather and rides out of the city. Jamie knocks Lord John down and takes him away under guard rather than leave him to the rebel militia, and the two of them travel as captor and captive with all the awkwardness that implies. Claire, left in a house presided over by Lord John's formidable cook, is joined by Jenny Murray, newly arrived from Scotland, and by Fergus and Marsali, whose printing press makes them a target as the occupation ends. The British army is evacuating Philadelphia for New York, the Continental army is marching to intercept it, and Young Ian is carrying dispatches between the two. Claire's marriage to Lord John, made for protection, has no standing now that Jamie lives, but unmaking it is the least of anyone's problems.

The other half of the family's story runs two centuries away. Roger and William Buccleigh MacKenzie, who went through the stones hunting Jem, have come out in the Highlands of the early eighteenth century instead of at the moment they aimed for, with no way to know whether the boy is in this time at all. They work their way toward Lallybroch, which is standing, occupied, and full of people who are Brianna's ancestors, and Roger has to lie about who he is to everyone he meets. Buck is a difficult companion with reasons of his own for being cautious about this particular corner of Scotland. In 1980, Brianna has worked out who took her son and why: Rob Cameron wants what the family knows, and he is prepared to use a child to get it. She goes after him herself rather than try to explain any of it to the police, with her daughter Amanda to keep safe at the same time.

The armies move into New Jersey, Clinton's column strung out for miles with its baggage and Washington's force closing on it. Jamie accepts a Continental commission and the men that go with it, and Claire follows the army as a surgeon. Then Claire is shot. The wound is bad enough that only Denzell Hunter's steadiness and Claire's own instructions keep her alive through the surgery, and she spends days in and out of consciousness while Jamie sits with her and the campaign goes on without either of them. She survives, weak and grounded, and is left behind to convalesce as the armies converge. Lord John, still a prisoner and then not, moves through the confusion trying to reach his own people; his brother Hal, Duke of Pardloe, has arrived in America looking for a missing son and a runaway daughter and is prepared to be extremely inconvenient about both. Young Ian and Rachel Hunter, and Denzell and Dottie, arrange what they can of their futures in the days before a battle.

28 June 1778: the battle at Monmouth Court House, fought in heat that kills as many men as the muskets do. The American advance guard falls back in confusion, Washington rides up, stops the retreat himself and re-forms the line, and the two armies hammer at each other across the fields and hedgerows all day. Jamie is in the middle of it with his men; Young Ian is in and out of the fighting; Denzell Hunter works in a field hospital that fills faster than he can empty it, with Rachel and Dottie carrying water and holding men down. William is on the British side of the same ground, doing a staff officer's work with no belief left in the cause he is doing it for. Fathers and sons, friends and enemies pass within yards of one another in the smoke. By dark the lines are still standing and the British hold their position, and both sides lie down among the wounded.

In the night Clinton's army slips away toward New York, leaving the Americans in possession of the field and, by that measure, of a victory. The counting begins: the dead, the men lost to the heat, the missing, the prisoners. The conduct of the general who ordered the first retreat becomes a scandal that will end in a court-martial. Jamie, who has done what he undertook to do and is past fifty with a wife recovering from a bullet, gives up his commission and means it. Claire mends slowly and badly and starts treating people again long before she should. The Quaker household sorts itself out: Denzell and Dottie, Rachel and Ian, and a Meeting that has opinions about all four of them. Lord John and Hal are reunited on their own side of the line, still a son short. William, having seen the battle from the losing end of his own convictions, has no army he wants to belong to and no name he is willing to use.

In the eighteenth-century Highlands, Roger and Buck's search takes them among people out of the family's own history, including the MacKenzies of Castle Leoch and a young woman in Cranesmuir whose future the reader knows better than she does, and Buck's connection to her makes the whole business dangerous for both of them. Buck's health begins to fail. Roger, preaching where he can and asking questions everywhere, learns more about the mechanics of travelling through the stones than anyone in the family has managed before, and none of it tells him where his son is. In America the Frasers put their affairs in order after the battle: Jamie out of the army, Claire on her feet again, Jenny installed in the household, and the question of where the family is to live now that Philadelphia is finished with them.

William, drifting behind the armies, falls in with two sisters from a Philadelphia brothel who have run away with the baggage train: Jane, and her small sister Frances. Jane kills a man to keep him away from the girl, is taken up for it, and is condemned to hang. William, with Young Ian's help and with Lord John's name for what it is worth, works to get her out of it, and they reach the guardhouse to find that Jane has ended it herself rather than wait for the rope. William buries her in ground he has to argue for, and takes Frances into his own keeping, having failed at the one thing he had lately been sure he ought to do. He also finishes, formally, with the army.

Brianna finds her son. Jem never went through the stones at all: he got away from Rob Cameron underground and stayed lost in the tunnels of the dam until his mother reached him, and Cameron's hold on the family ends there. With Roger two centuries away and no other road to him, Brianna takes Jem and Amanda through the stone circle after their father, and the MacKenzies are reunited in the past. In America, William delivers Frances to safety and, in the course of the Grey family's tangled business, meets Amaranthus Cowden, the young widow of his cousin Benjamin, with an infant son whose existence bears directly on the family's inheritance and on Hal's search for the son he has been told is dead. Jamie and Claire, done with Philadelphia and with the northern war, turn south.

Jamie and Claire come home to Fraser's Ridge, where the Big House is a cellar hole and the settlement has spent two years without them, and begin again: a cabin first, a house to follow, a surgery, a garden, and a household that now includes Jenny Murray and Frances Pocock, the girl William sent to them. Claire's marriage to Lord John is void and her friendship with him survives; so, in a battered form, does his with Jamie. Young Ian and Rachel Hunter marry in the Quaker manner. William is out of the army, out of patience with everyone's version of his own history, and free to go where he likes, with the Grey family's affairs and a missing cousin still unsettled. Roger, Brianna and the children are together again in the eighteenth century and bound for America. The war has swung to the southern colonies, which is exactly where the Frasers have just chosen to live.

Jamie and Claire go home. They ride south to Fraser's Ridge, where the burned Big House is a cellar hole and the settlement has spent two years without them, and begin the work of building again, with Jenny Murray in the household and Frances Pocock, whom William entrusted to them, as their ward. Claire has recovered from the wound that nearly killed her; her marriage to Lord John has been undone by Jamie's being alive, and the friendship between the two men survives in a battered form. Young Ian and Rachel Hunter marry in the Friends' manner. William has left the army, refuses to be anyone's son and has attached himself to no cause, but he has done what he could for Jane's sister and has met his cousin Benjamin's widow, Amaranthus, and her infant, whose existence matters a great deal to the Grey family's affairs. Hal Grey is still in America and still short one son. In the eighteenth-century Highlands, Roger's family reaches him: Brianna, having recovered Jem from Rob Cameron in 1980, brought both children through the stones, and the MacKenzies are together again and bound for America. The war has moved south, and the Frasers, back on their own mountain, are directly in its path.