Scottish Shire #8
It’s Halloween in Nairn, a small seaside village in northern Scotland, and when teenage Brody Shaw accepts a dare to video the Wraith of Rait Ruins at a local castle, things go seriously wrong. Brody flees the ghost in terror, drops his phone, and returns to face his friends in shame. Worse, when he and mum Paislee return to look for his phone later that night, they find the dead body of a local teen dressed as the wraith. Was her death an accident or was it related to a theft at Cawdor Castle the same night? And who is leaving fliers promoting Scottish independence at crime scenes in the area?
It’s up to DI Mack Zeffer to solve the case and keep girlfriend Paislee safely out of it. Besides finding the body, Paislee gets involved when a reporter splashes a story about Brody across the front page of the local newspaper. Although busy with her specialty knitting shop, Cashmere Crush, Paislee is determined to protect her son from harassment while also helping him cope with the trauma of finding a dead body, even if it means looking into the case.
Paislee’s birthday is coming up, so she’s also juggling family plans, Bonfire Night plans, and out-of-town guests. This includes her best friend Lydia who is strangely distracted. Paislee is so busy it’s a good thing her grandpa and employees can run the shop!
The interesting characters, setting, and (of course) the Halloween theme made this book really appealing to me, so I jumped in without reading the previous books in the series. Since this is book 8, I have a lot of catching up to do while waiting on the next book.
I was so intrigued by Nairn that I looked it up and learned that not only is Nairn a real place, it’s near Cawdor Castle (setting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth), it’s closely linked to the Battle of Culloden (the last battle on mainland Britain that ended the Jacobite uprising), and the area has THREE inhabited castles (Brodie, Cawdor, and Kilravock) in addition to lots of ruins. Really unexpected fact: Nairn was Charlie Chaplin’s favorite vacation spot. And I must say, Paislee’s yarn shop that carries cashmere yarn and also makes bespoke sweaters sounds like my ideal vacation spot! — Cathy Akers-Jordan