Death of a Kingfisher

One of the more recent installments in the Hamish Macbeth series from M.C. Beaton (2012 publication) finds Hamish still up to his usual tricks of solving the crimes while trying to stay under the radar--his goal being to avoid promotion, which might result in having to leave his cozy little town of Lochdubh. The murders seem to be a bit more bizarre (an elevator chair shot through the ceiling of an old hunting lodge) and grisly (someone's head cut off with a chain saw) than usual, but there are the more typical dirty tricks by Hamish's nemesis Blair, like hiding key pieces of evidence, and all the colorful characters we have come to know like the Currie sisters, Elspeth, and Angus Macdonald. The trouble seems to start when the town of Braikie hires an ambitious tourist director to promote a scenic plot of land called Buchan's Wood, which she promptly renames "Fairy Glen", and the tourists begin to flood in. But somebody apparently doesn't like this turn of events and hangs the iconic kingfisher bird whose image had adorned the promotional brochure, and then sabotages a bridge in the glen, causing several tourists to be injured. Hamish is torn between his attraction to the attractive tourist director, Mary, and his suspicion that she might be involved. And then there are the two strange grandchildren of the first murder victim, Charles and Olivia Palfour, who admit they wanted the old woman dead, but don't seem to have had the skills to pull off the murder. I think these books are better listened to than read because the usual reader, Graeme Malcolm, does a wonderful job with the pronunciation of local names and dialect, conveying the flavor of the place with even greater flair. These really are the perfect audiobooks for a car trip--entertaining but not so engrossing that you can't pay attention to where you're going--and we have listened to a lot of them over the years (e.g. Death of a Maid).