DEATH AT A HIGHLAND WEDDING

A present-day police detective whisked off to Victorian Scotland sets about solving crimes.

While visiting her grandmother in Edinburgh, Vancouver police Detective Mallory Atkinson witnesses a crime, is attacked, and suddenly finds herself back in 1869 in the body of housemaid Catriona Mitchell. Catriona works for Duncan Gray, a doctor now running his family undertaking business, who assists his best friend, Det. Hugh McCreadie, with forensic investigations. Honoring her talent for detection, Gray has made Catriona his assistant and brought her into his home. The presence of his eccentric sister, Isla, does not preclude neighbors from assuming that Catriona is Gray’s mistress. Only the household knows that Catriona is really Mallory, who must struggle to conceal her 21st-century mores. When they are all invited to the Highland wedding of McCreadie’s sister, Fiona, it turns out to be a gathering fraught with hidden undercurrents. Even before their arrival, they meet with ill will from the groom, Archie Cranston, whose sister, Violet, was formerly engaged to McCreadie. The unhappiness of the tenants at the groom’s hunting lodge, where the ceremony is to take place, has been exacerbated by the boorish Austrian gamekeeper and his mantraps, which, to Mallory’s fury, have wounded a Scottish wildcat and killed its mother. During a walk, Mallory, Gray, and McCreadie find part of a butchered deer and then the body of Cranston’s friend Ezra Sinclair wearing Cranston’s coat. When the inexperienced and opinionated local constable arrests Cranston, the investigative trio intervene. Was Sinclair or Cranston the target for murder? And is the killer a disgruntled local or one of their own friends?

Time travel provides the framework for a captivating mystery and intriguing insights into life in 1870s Scotland.