Death of a Dreamer
M.C. Beaton
A Hamish MacBeth Mystery
I’ve been a sucker for English village mysteries since I
read my first Agatha Christie. I think
that I somewhat relate to them because I was raised in a small town in Montana
where it seemed that everyone knew everybody’s business. In the small-town mysteries, it is that
knowing of the residence, their emotional and psychological idiosyncrasies, and
of course the local gossip, and curiosity that generally lead to the discovery
of the culprits and the motivation for the crime. I also appreciate that they are generally
relatively free of all the gory details that you find in watching shows like
“Criminal Minds” or “CSI” and its various spin-offs.
The Hamish MacBeth mysteries are set in the remote village
of Lochdubh in the Highlands of Scotland.
This is one of the later novels (copyright 2006, Mystery Press, Warner
Books) with the earliest novels beginning publication in 1985 with a new novel
on almost an annual schedule. I’ve
reserved some of the older works to become better acquainted with the Hamish
MacBeth. Wikipedia gives a good general
description of the character at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamish_Macbeth.
In this novel, “outsiders” that aren’t the typical tourists start
showing up in the small village. Hamish
visits with each of them and actually has good first impressions of each of
them except for the snobby, rich American; but then as the plot unfolds he finds
that the seemingly nice landscape artist is anything but an innocent man, but
rather the motivation for murders by someone he least suspects.
I liked this mystery novel, because I didn’t figure it out
before the conclusion and M.C. Beaton does a good job of developing the
characters and using the local speech provincialisms to distinguish the
characters’ origins and emotional attitude at various times during
conversations with the law enforcement.
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