Publication date January 23, 2024

Summary

Paislee Shaw runs Cashmere Crush, a knitting shop, in the small town of Nairn, Scotland. She has been offered an exciting opportunity to sell her cashmere goods in the new gift shop at Ramsey Castle, and decides to make her first delivery to the castle on the day of the annual Bagpipe competition. 

Paislee loves the annual competition and the barbecue that follows, but for the Grant clan of Ramsey Castle, winning is a matter of pride. When the Cunningham clan defeated the Grant clan the previous year, the family had taken the loss badly. Robert, the current Earl, is determined to retake the bagpiping crown.

When the Cunningham’s star piper dies, pressure is put on Paislee to help figure out what happened. The problem is that Paislee is facing so much pressure in her personal life that she isn’t sure how she can possibly manage. 

My Thoughts

This was a good book. The writing was engaging, and the story was well-plotted. The mystery had a good number of clues and red herrings. 

The backdrop of a yarn shop in a small village in the Scottish highlands makes for a cosy atmosphere. From the castle grounds, to cottages and pubs, to a shop that specializes in making bagpipes, the settings were well-described. I appreciate the amount of research that clearly went in to this book.

For the most part, the characters were likable and well-developed. However, though she’s very well-developed, I don’t find Paislee a character who is easy to like. 

She’s a young single mother who runs her own business and money is a constant struggle for her, and as a result she has very high levels of anxiety, which is certainly understandable. At the same time, she does tend to make things harder for herself by holding herself to ridiculously high standards. She sees a broken pipe as a personal failing. She’s also prickly, judge-y, and has a tendency to strike out at people who care about her. While all of that makes her character three-dimensional, spending 300 pages with someone who is almost perpetually either angry or angst-y is not enjoyable for me in a mystery setting.

One thing that I struggled with was the inconsistent use of dialect. In some conversations, “to” was always spelled as “tae”, “good” as “guid”, and so on, but that wasn’t always the case. Even the same individual didn’t always use it consistently in conversations with the same people.  The first chapter was so heavy with dialect that reading it was tiring. Rather than contributing to the atmosphere, it began to grate on my nerves because it felt inauthentic.

Though I have read others in the series, it was a few years ago, and I didn’t remember the characters or stories very clearly. I didn’t find that a problem in my enjoyment of this book. 

Many thanks to NetGalley for the free eARC of this book which I received in exchange for an honest review.

My Rating 3/5

About the Author

Traci Hall is the author of books in many genres including romance, mystery, paranomal, and non-fiction. To learn more about the author and her books, be sure to check out her website.