SCOT FREE
by Catriona McPherson
A Scottish lass comes to California, where murder, mishaps, and misunderstandings ensue.
Leagsaidh “Lexy” Campbell, clinical psychologist, met dentist Branston Lancer at a golf resort in Scotland, followed him to California, married in haste, and is repenting big time. Their vastly different expectations and linguistic misunderstandings might have been overcome if Lexy hadn’t caught Bran in bed with his second ex-wife, leading to a quickie Nevada divorce. Lexy’s about to fly back to Scotland when the police arrive on the Fourth of July and accuse her of helping Visalia Bombaro, her one and only marriage-counseling client, of murdering her husband, whom she calls Cousin Clovis because that’s who he is. Even after 67 years of marriage, the Bombaros had constantly fought. Lexy and Visalia both have alibis of a sort, but the police think they may have been in it together. The highly successful Bombaro fireworks business is in competition with Dolshikov’s Pyrotasia, another big family-owned company into which Clovis’ niece just married. Forced to stay local, Lexy moves into the Lassditch Motel, where she makes several new friends. Her next-door neighbors, doctors Todd and Roger, are living in a highly decorated and upgraded room because Todd’s severe case of cleptoparasitosis has driven them from their home to Lassditch, where the owner and her dirt-averse partner keep everything spotlessly clean. Todd and Roger redecorate Lexy’s room to their standards, cut her hair, buy her proper underwear, and try to help her find the real killer so that Visalia can go off to her Italian dream retreat and Lexy to Scotland. Meanwhile, Lexy’s friends are under attack by someone who leaves all manner of rare and disgusting bugs in their bathrooms. Plenty of plausible motives for Clovis’ murder force the unlikely sleuths to use everything at their disposal to come up with the killer.
McPherson, a master of creepy psychological mysteries (House.Tree.Person, 2017, etc.), shows an utterly different side of herself in this zany series kickoff.