SCOT IN A TRAP

A Scot living in California continues to get tripped up by American ways and American English.

Therapist Lexy Campbell lives on a houseboat behind the Last Ditch Motel, where her floridly eccentric friends have gathered for her second Thanksgiving in the U.S. The Covid lockdown they’ve lived through was easy compared to the nerve-wracking wait for Della, her overdue friend, to give birth. Having offered Della and Dylan the use of the houseboat for the delivery, Lexy’s moved with her boyfriend, Taylor, to the motel only to be awakened by the squalling newborn. Asked to deliver breakfast to an actual paying guest, Lexy finally realizes his silence is due to a bullet in the head. When their pal Sgt. Molly Rankinson announces that this isn’t a case of suicide, Taylor reckons that they were awakened at 3 a.m. by a noise Lexy now thinks was a silenced gunshot, and only then heard the baby crying. Though Lexy and her pals have solved a number of murder cases, she realizes that she’s in trouble when she recognizes the dead man as Menzies Lassiter, her boyfriend back in Scotland when she was 17. Even more disconcertingly, her mother tells her that Menzies had recently visited her to find out where Lexy was living. Lexy’s been lying to herself about why they broke up, but now the truth must come out, especially when her cast-iron alibi is challenged by new information about the time of death.

A wildly funny, deadly serious look at misogyny and sexual abuse.