Amy Myers is known for her short stories and historical novels featuring Victorian chef Auguste Didier and chimney sweep Tom Wasp. Her contemporary series feature ex-cop Peter Marsh and Daughter and classic car detective Jack Colby, and she is currently working on a new series starring Cara Shelley who runs a café in the grounds of stately home Tanton Towers.
Website: www.amymyers.net
M.C. Beaton is well known not only for her Agatha Raisin novels and TV series but for Sergeant Hamish Macbeth who has conquered hearts for many a year. She died in 2019 [but with the help of her friend, the writer R.W. Green], Hamish Macbeth with his idiosyncratic approach to police work lives again with beguiling effect in Death of a Traitor.
If you haven’t already met this Scottish highlander, Hamish’s mission is to deal with all the misfortunes of the residents of the small village of Lochdubh in the remote and glorious northern highlands of Sutherland. Hamish is on the case whether the misfortune be spiders on an elderly woman’s wall – or murder. In Death of a Traitor, it is very much the latter (although the spiders don’t get ignored.)
When sheep farmer Gregor Mackenzie spots his unpopular neighbour Kate Hibbert dragging a suitcase along the rough track to the main road, he rejoices that she is clearly going to be away for some time. Three weeks later, however, Kate’s cousin Diane comes to stay in the village hotel demanding to know why nothing has been done to find Kate. Hamish promptly upgrades his efforts to find an apparently missing person to a case of urgency when Kate’s body is found drowned in the loch close to the rocky island of Auld Mary by visiting geologist and historian Sally Paterson.
Hamish sets out to solve the mystery despite being bedevilled by visiting superiors who have different views to his on what has been happening. His clashes with them lead the investigation on from the tiny village to a world of intrigue, violence and corruption.
The strength of this novel lies not so much in the mystery of Kate Hibbert’s death, but in its atmospheric setting of the Highlands. The author has a gift of not only describing the way of village life in this remote and beautiful landscape but taking the reader very much with her to share it together with its haunting history. Death of a Traitor is easy reading with good story-telling. Hamish Macbeth lives on.
Co-written by R.W. Green
