I was given this book to review from Netgalley and Bookouture for a fair and honest review.
When a fun day out in the Scottish Highlands turns fatal, there’s only one solution: call for Ally McKinley!
It’s the annual Locharran Highland Games and Ally McKinley has never seen her little village so busy or excited. Everyone’s enjoying the Scottish dancing, the bagpipes, and cheering the competitors on. But there’s a hitch in the proceedings when champion challenger Archie Armstrong drops dead in the middle of tossing the caber. Rushing to the scene, Ally is the first to spot that Archie’s death was no accident – this was murder!
Ally flings herself into a new investigation and soon discovers that more than one person may have had a murderous motive, including some of the current residents of her cosy little guesthouse. Patti, Archie’s glamourous wife, seems intent on acting like the perfect widow, but rumours of infidelity have been flying. Is her performance too good? Could her uncle, cranky gamekeeper Angus, have finally snapped, furious at Archie’s treatment of his niece? Or was it one of the frustrated local competitors, desperate to end Archie’s winning streak?
Determined to crack the case and fueled by more than one piece of her famous shortbread, Ally begins to narrow down her list of possible culprits, but is thrown for a loop when her chief suspect is found dead by the loch, a mysterious and threatening note clutched in their fingers. With a killer at large, can Ally finally uncover the truth? Or, as the sun sets over the highlands, will this game be her last?
I really like this series. I love the fact that the main character is a senior, but she doesn't act old. Not to say that sometimes she doesn't feel her age, but she just doesn't act elderly. She is also not overly silly or anything like that.
So in this one there are some foreigners from Canada who are visiting as one of them is a champion in the games from Canada and wanted to compete in Scotland. He is naturally hated because he isn't from Scotland, so it wasn't surprising that he ends up murder at the games, but would someone murder because he was winning?
Of course, Ally is hosting the Canadian family at her B&B, so she is naturally curious and a bit invested in trying to figure out who might have done it from the competitors to the family. Another family member is murdered, and it seems that maybe someone has it out for the family.
I think one of the things I liked about this one is that I felt that Ally was so busy with trying to help the family that she really didn't do a lot of sleuthing, a lot of what she found out just kind of came natural and she really didn't figure things out till it was a bit too late, kind of on accident. I really don't like when sleuths are to overly nosy or it seems like that is all they do and they are never at their actual work. So that was refreshing. I like that the detective doesn't mind her helping a bit with things by asking questions. I really like Ross her boyfriend too.
The mystery was decent, but I figured things out even the motive so maybe it was to easy to figure out or I am just getting better at figuring them out...lol. A few times I found myself asking Ally why she wasn't thinking about this or that as it was on my mind...lol. It was kind of fun to find that I was right, so it didn't really lessen the enjoyment or anything.
I think if you like cozy mysteries this is a fun series and I would highly recommend.
4 stars
Dee MacDonald grew up on an isolated farm in the Scottish Highlands. An only child, she’d often get fed up of reading and listening to a crackling radio, so her mother encouraged her to draw and to write ‘wee stories’, which she’d sew together into little books.
As an adult, her working life took her all over the globe as an air stewardess, into the world of TV, where she worked in Market Research and Sales, and then into hospitality, running B&Bs for over ten years.
After first finding her love of writing as a little girl, Dee became a published author of cosy crime and women’s fiction in her seventies. She lives by the sea in Cornwall with her husband, and has one son and two grandsons.
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