After the events of Death of a Charming Man, Hamish Macbeth is back to being a regular police constable and is nursing a broken heart after his relationship with the lovely Priscilla Halburton-Smythe fell apart. Generally blamed in the sleepy Highland village of Lochdubh for breaking Priscilla’s heart (since he was the one who ended their engagement), Hamish decides to get away for a bit and picks the not too distant, charming coastal village of Skag. Shortly after arriving at the bed and breakfast however, he finds that the holiday is doomed from the start. The penny pinching owners of the B&B serve food that is all but inedible and his fellow vacationers vary from boring to obnoxious. When one of them, a man named Bob Harris who constantly bullied his timid wife, turns up dead, no one is entirely surprised but everyone (including Hamish) is a suspect. It’s up to Hamish and the local police to track down the murderer before they strike again.

This was another rough one in this series. Kind of more 2 and a half stars for me. I enjoy the atmosphere and dark humor enough to keep reading but Beaton’s attitude towards women is starting to get a bit obnoxious. It’s particularly obvious in this story as there’s always some female figure for her to get edgy comments in about how slutty or stupid they are. I still enjoy Hamish’s laidback, observant approach to solving the crimes but this one just wasn’t as good as some of the earlier ones. The mystery was mildly interesting but a bit more predictable than I’d prefer and there wasn’t a whole lot that made it compelling outside of Hamish himself.

As a side note, the audiobook of this with Shaun Grindell as narrator is remarkably bad. I get that he’s English, but I would’ve thought he’d be able to tell the difference between a Scottish and an Irish accent. I’m American born and bred and it still makes me cringe.