DEATH OF A GROOM

When a groom is slain on his wedding day, the suspects are snowed in.

Sergeant Hamish Macbeth of Lochdubh, Scotland, who’s had several near-misses in the marriage mart, still remains friendly with his ex-girlfriends. Coincidentally, two of them are on hand for the high-society wedding of Alannah Hamilton and Darius Palmerston. The wedding site is the Tommel Castle Hotel, skillfully run by Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, one of the exes. The wedding, though small, is great for the hotel, as the bride’s father, Charles Hamilton, has spent a fortune to make it grand. Another of Hamish’s exes, reporter Elspeth Grant, arrives in a helicopter with her boss, a Hamilton family friend. A local seer who warns that the wedding must not take place tells tales of witches and death, and Elspeth, who has the gift of second sight, has seen a bloody death. It all comes true when, after the cake-cutting, Darius is killed with his own sword. With most of the local police involved in a drug bust and the senior officer ending up in the hospital just before a major snowstorm, it falls to Hamish to investigate. He soon identifies a plethora of suspects. Darius and his best friend, who spent years pretending to be soldiers, gadding around Europe and spending their inheritances, are now broke. The bride seemed to prefer the man who looks after the family’s horses, and the groom his wife’s stepmother. Alannah’s bridesmaid vanishes and turns up murdered. The pool of possible killers ranges from peers to band members. Since most of them hated Darius, it won’t be easy for Hamish to pick out a killer or two.

The delightfully stubborn and opinionated hero solves the case and may even find a bride of his own.