Time travel provides the framework for a captivating mystery and intriguing insights into life in 1870s Scotland.
A present-day police detective whisked off to Victorian Scotland sets about solving crimes.
While visiting her grandmother in Edinburgh, Vancouver police Detective Mallory Atkinson witnesses a crime, is attacked, and suddenly finds herself back in 1869 in the body of housemaid Catriona Mitchell. Catriona works for Duncan Gray, a doctor now running his family undertaking business, who assists his best friend, Det. Hugh McCreadie, with forensic investigations. Honoring her talent for detection, Gray has made Catriona his assistant and brought her into his home. The presence of his eccentric sister, Isla, does not preclude neighbors from assuming that Catriona is Gray’s mistress. Only the household knows that Catriona is really Mallory, who must struggle to conceal her 21st-century mores. When they are all invited to the Highland wedding of McCreadie’s sister, Fiona, it turns out to be a gathering fraught with hidden undercurrents. Even before their arrival, they meet with ill will from the groom, Archie Cranston, whose sister, Violet, was formerly engaged to McCreadie. The unhappiness of the tenants at the groom’s hunting lodge, where the ceremony is to take place, has been exacerbated by the boorish Austrian gamekeeper and his mantraps, which, to Mallory’s fury, have wounded a Scottish wildcat and killed its mother. During a walk, Mallory, Gray, and McCreadie find part of a butchered deer and then the body of Cranston’s friend Ezra Sinclair wearing Cranston’s coat. When the inexperienced and opinionated local constable arrests Cranston, the investigative trio intervene. Was Sinclair or Cranston the target for murder? And is the killer a disgruntled local or one of their own friends?
Time travel provides the framework for a captivating mystery and intriguing insights into life in 1870s Scotland.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781250321312
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.
An aristocratic young mother proves a dab hand at solving murders in 1937.
Lady Georgiana O’Mara is a cousin to both the new King George VI and the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated to marry the rapacious Mrs. Simpson. She’s married to the Honorable Darcy O’Mara, heir to an Irish title, but they don’t have much money even though Darcy works for the government in a hush-hush position. Luckily, she’s the heir to her well-off godfather, who’s letting Georgie, Darcy, and their son, James, live in his home. Everything is going well until Georgie’s bossy sister-in-law, Fig, Duchess of Rannoch, sends a much-too-proper nanny to take care of James, and announces that she intends to visit herself to make sure things run as she insists they should. Thoroughly intimidated, Georgie unhappily puts up with her unwanted visitors. Darcy encourages Georgie to go to London to visit her friend Zou Zou, a Polish princess who might help her find a nanny more to her liking. When Georgie arrives at her friend’s house, Zou Zou is rushing off to a funeral for a young man who died in a tragic accident, but Georgie soon runs into another friend, Belinda, who’s just returned from Paris. Another young man has just died in an apparent accident, but there’s something that doesn’t sit well with Georgie about the deaths. The death of a third young man sets the alarm bells ringing, and a fourth death sends sirens blaring, urging Georgie to look for connections among the deceased. They were all Darcy’s age and all set to inherit estates. Why were they targeted for death?
The pre–World War II ambiance provides an apt setting for some ingenious murders in a case worthy of the clever sleuth.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641392
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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