It's a work of fiction that I am now planning to read, and the author was a local historian who clearly did an enormous amount of research for it, but I don't know if I, personally, would rely on it as my main historical referent for the events in question.
Yeah. I mean, I am a person whose main fandom is set in a historical mid-18th century period which spawned a lot of historical novels during the 19th century, and I would not use those novels as historical sources. Although I guess they're good sources about the relationship between the 19th and 18th centuries.