From the archive…
DEATH OF A SNOB (1992) by M.C. Beaton
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
It’s Christmas in the Scottish Highlands and Hamish
Macbeth, police constable of the village of Lochdubh, is miserable indoors with
a head cold while a snowstorm rages outdoors. He’s equally miserable because
he’s been looking forward to spending the holiday with his parents, who have
“moved to a croft house and land near Rogart.” Other family members will be
there as well, among them his Aunt Hannah—and there’s the rub. “Aunt Hannah,”
you see, “was a fat-loud-mouthed harridan who loathed Hamish. But she had been
generous to the not-too-comfortably-off Macbeths with presents of money and
gifts for Hamish’s little brothers and sisters. Never anything for Hamish. She
loathed him and never tired of saying so.”
“Ever since you put that mouse down her back when you
were eight, she’s never been fond o’ you,” his mother reminds him, and Hamish
understands that his attendance at the festivities, which will potentially
prove remunerative for his parents, would be looked upon with
less-than-sanguine eyes—especially Hannah’s. She is arriving on December 20th,
so Hamish promises that if the head cold doesn’t kill him, he’ll drop off
presents before then.
He’s barely back in bed when Priscilla
Halburton-Smythe, “once the love of his life, until Hamish had grown heartily sick
of the weight of the torch he was carrying for her,” shows up at his door.
She’s there to ask that Hamish give some advice to her friend Jane Wetherby,
and Hamish agrees to see Jane the following day. The tall attractive woman who
shows up is wearing “a thin white blouse plunged at the front to a deep V” that
she tends to emphasize, inadvertently or otherwise, by leaning forward when she
speaks intently. She fears that someone might be trying to kill her. Her
suspicion is based on a couple of potentially fatal accidents—or were they
merely unfortunate incidents?—which have recently occurred.
Jane is the proprietor of “a health farm called The
Happy Wanderer on the island of Eileencraig….‘I not only teach people how to
have a healthy body but how to get in touch with their innermost feelings.’”
When she explains that a villager read her tea leaves and said someone was
trying to kill her, she “began to worry about my guests.”
As you can easily imagine, Hamish becomes one of the
guests.
The farm is closed for the winter, so the guests are
friends Jane has invited to spend Christmas with her. They include two married
couples, Jane’s ex-husband, and Harriet Shaw, a woman who writes cookbooks and
to whom Hamish finds himself attracted despite their age difference. One of
these people is the titular snob, and the others are among the suspects Hamish
must contend with while also clashing with the local constabulary.
Death of a Snob is the sixth title in the Hamish
Macbeth series but the first that I’ve read. I’m not sure I ever would have
were it not for a longtime friend of mine who is an equally voracious reader,
and who told me he’d enjoyed several titles in the series which—like this
one—are short, quick, and diverting reads. M.C. Beaton excels at characterizations,
particularly through dialogue, and atmosphere, especially when depicting the
tensions among the Christmas guests at the health farm and the hostility of the
Eileencraig islanders toward strangers. She’s also quite skilled at conveying a
gentle kind of humor.
With the caveat that you avoid the epub edition I read as being obnoxiously riddled with typos and other problems in both narrative and dialogue, I can readily recommend it. Unfortunately, I can’t recall where I acquired this particular epub edition, so you’re on your own in that respect.
Barry Ergang ©20016, 2021
Some of Derringer Award-winning author’s Barry Ergang’s work is available at Smashwords and Amazon.
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