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 ©2017, 2022
Among his other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s
locked-room novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, can be found in e-book formats at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com
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