There’s a popular nostalgic myth concerning the idyllic nature of small town life in the fifties, back when everybody knew their place and civility and godliness ruled. Of course the truth is considerably more complicated – it’s not always a great thing when everybody knows everybody, and hatred and passion seem to grow more virulently in enclosed places.

Nobody knows better that there are secrets festering behind even the most proper façade of their small Scottish town than the staff of the local newspaper The Highland Gazette, but even they are shocked when one of their own, quiet, efficient, reserved office manager Mrs. Smart, is murdered, that shock compounded when another staff member, well liked editor Don McLeod, is arrested for the crime, which was evidently motived by a long standing relationship their co-workers knew nothing about. read more

We had a surprise break-out hit last fall with Malliet’s Wicked Autumn. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise, though, because Wicked Autumn, just like A Fatal Winter, is a well crafted British traditional mystery, the kind the Brits themselves no longer seem interested in writing.  (Malliet, like Elizabeth George, Martha Grimes, and Deborah Crombie, is American). But the appetite for this kind of book and storytelling is ravenous.

Malliet, referencing both Father Brown and Hercule Poirot in her series centering on Anglican priest Max Tudor (he resembles Hugh Grant), in fact reminds me more of Ngaio Marsh.  Her central character, like Marsh’s Alleyn, is self-deprecatingly handsome, and though he’s not secretly titled, like Allyn (or Mr. Campion, come to that) he does have the secret of being a former member of the MI5.  This adds to his dash. read more