Death of a Gossip

Pick it up: If you enjoy cosy crime novels, if you’re looking for a quick and engaging read, if you want to read a well-plotted murder mystery with an unusual detective.

This is the first book in the Hamish Macbeth series created by M C Beaton. These books are set in the fictional village of Lochdubh (which is Gaelic for black lake). This is a small village in the Scottish Highlands, where everyone knows everyone else, and the police force consists of one constable, Hamish Macbeth.

Constable Macbeth seems like he fits the stereotype of the lazy and stupid village bobby who has nothing to do other than go after the occasional poacher, but there's more to him than that. This story is set around a fishing school run by John and Heather Cartwright. Every week in the summer, a new group of students shows up to learn the art of fly fishing while enjoying a holiday in the highlands.

The book begins with John Cartwright showing up to meet the latest group of students. It’s an interesting bunch of people who might get along and have a good time if it wasn’t for one truly awful member of the party, Lady Jane Withers. She’s a society widow and a notorious gossip columnist, who upsets everyone with her sharp tongue, her snobbishness, and general rudeness.

When she’s found murdered, Constable Macbeth wants to find out who did it. But he’s taken off the case by his superiors who assume that he wouldn’t have a clue where to start. He hands his office over to his boss, Detective Inspector Blair and goes about the village talking to people and finding things out in his own quiet way. The further he digs, the more secrets he finds, and the more tangled everything gets. But he figures it out in the end.

This is a cosy crime novel with all the classic elements of that genre, and it is made extra charming by the remote setting, all the elements of fly fishing, and the character of Constable Macbeth who is not the kind of police-detective that we usually read about. This book was published in 1985 and it is the first of a series of thirty-seven books featuring Hamish Macbeth.