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Scotch on the Rocks is a rarity in the realm of speculative political novels in that it was penned by a former British foreign secretary, Douglas Home (with the assistance of freelancer Andrew Osmond). Set in the near future, the plot concerned a particularly volatile Scottish separatist movement. Enlisting the participation of thousands of knife-wielding street gang members, the movement managed to expunge all British authority in Scotland. This political upheaval coincided with a mysterious wave of livestock deaths, leaving the Scottish countryside dotted with the rotting corpses of unfortunate sheep. Could this phenomenon be tied in with the separatists -- and if so, what was the real agenda of the insurgents? The hero of the piece was British PM Harvey, a character rather blatantly patterned after the author of the piece. A five-part TV adaptation of Scotch on the Rocks was seen over BBC's Scotland service in 1972, nearly 25 years before Scotland actually did declare its independence from Britain -- not by violence, but through peaceful transition of power, spurred on by the popularity of the Mel Gibson theatrical feature Braveheart.