Bookouture Tour for Murder at the Highland Games by Dee McDonald

I’m dishing today about the fourth book in the Ally McKinley cozy mystery series – Murder at the Highland Games. I love this series, which focuses on a middle-aged woman who runs a guest house in Scotland and solves mysteries. There’s a fun cast of local characters in these stories and they are well-plotted and well-paced. I did not figure it out before the “reveal”. Can’t wait for the next story – you can read them as stand alones or in order.

Here’s the scoop:

When a fun day out in the Scottish Highlands turns fatal, there’s only one solution: call for Ally McKinley!

It’s the annual Locharran Highland Games and Ally McKinley has never seen her little village so busy or excited. Everyone’s enjoying the Scottish dancing, the bagpipes, and cheering the competitors on. But there’s a hitch in the proceedings when champion challenger Archie Armstrong drops dead in the middle of tossing the caber. Rushing to the scene, Ally is the first to spot that Archie’s death was no accident – this was murder!

Ally flings herself into a new investigation and soon discovers that more than one person may have had a murderous motive, including some of the current residents of her cosy little guesthouse. Patti, Archie’s glamourous wife, seems intent on acting like the perfect widow, but rumours of infidelity have been flying. Is her performance too good? Could her uncle, cranky gamekeeper Angus, have finally snapped, furious at Archie’s treatment of his niece? Or was it one of the frustrated local competitors, desperate to end Archie’s winning streak?

Determined to crack the case and fuelled by more than one piece of her famous shortbread, Ally begins to narrow down her list of possible culprits, but is thrown for a loop when her chief suspect is found dead by the loch, a mysterious and threatening note clutched in their fingers. With a killer at large, can Ally finally uncover the truth? Or, as the sun sets over the highlands, will this game be her last?

For fans of Agatha Christie, Faith Martin and Clare Chase, this totally unputdownable cozy mystery set in the beautiful Scottish Highlands will have you turning the pages late into the night!

About the author:

Dee MacDonald grew up on an isolated farm in the Scottish Highlands. An only child, she’d often get fed up of reading and listening to a crackling radio, so her mother encouraged her to draw and to write ‘wee stories’, which she’d sew together into little books.

As an adult, her working life took her all over the globe as an air stewardess, into the world of TV, where she worked in Market Research and Sales, and then into hospitality, running B&Bs for over ten years.

After first finding her love of writing as a little girl, Dee became a published author of cosy crime and women’s fiction in her seventies. She lives by the sea in Cornwall with her husband, and has one son and two grandsons.