Delightful and endearing are two of the words that come to mind when trying to describe Stewart's first ScotShop mystery. I am a lover of all things Scottish (well, except for maybe the food) and I embrace my Scottish ancestry wholeheartedly, so I reveled wholeheartedly in the talk of tartans, bagpipes, and sporrans and Peggy's treks around the Scottish countryside.
Peggy Winn (of Welsh, not Scottish descent) owns the ScotShop, a store devoted to all things Scottish in the tiny Vermont tourist town of Hamelin. each year she travels to a village in the highlands of Scotland to purchase stock and make connections for her shop. This year she discovers a small shop on a dark side street, where purchases a beautiful antique tartan shawl that comes with something extra. When she unfolds the shawl and places it on her shoulders a handsome, 14th century ghost appears! On her return to Vermont she discovers that not only has the ghost, "Dirk," traveled back with her, but that the dead body of her unfaithful ex-boyfriend, Mason, is under a fallen bookcase in her shop. Since her cousin Shoe's baseball bat was used in the attack on Mason, Shoe is accused of the crime and jailed, prompting Peggy to investigate with the aid of handsome police detective harper.
While the mystery is fine, the best part of this novel is the series on verbal exchanges between Peggy and Dirk, who turns out to be a very intelligent and curious ghost, asking constant questions about language, customs, and technology. This is fun read!
No comments:
Post a Comment