Scot Mist (Last Ditch Mystery)

by Catriona McPherson

Despite efforts to create a safe environment to see out the pandemic, the residents of the Last Ditch Motel face more dangers than they imagined possible in this hilarious yet claustrophobic mystery.

March 2020 and Operation Cocker is a go! The owners of the Last Ditch Motel, with a little help from their friend Lexy Campbell, are preparing to support one another through the oncoming lockdown, offering the motel's spare rooms to a select few from the local area in need of sanctuary.

While the newbies are settling in, an ambiguous banner appears demanding one of them return home. But who is it for? Lexy and her friends put a plan into action to ward off the perpetrator, but the very next night, a resident disappears and a message scrawled in human blood is found.

As California shuts down, the Last Ditchers make another gruesome discovery. They tried to create a haven but now it seems as if everyone's in danger. Is the motel under attack from someone on the outside? Scary as that is, the alternative is worse by far.

• ISBN10: 0727890336
• ISBN13: 9780727890337
• Publish Date: 25 November 2021
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
• Imprint: Severn House
• Edition: Main
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Scot Mist is the fourth cozy(ish) Last Ditch mystery by Catriona McPherson. Released 1st Feb 2022 by Severn HouseSevern House, it's 240 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is such an exuberantly fun "closed(ish)" setting for a murder mystery. It's set at the very beginning of the covid lockdown panic in a fictive small town in California where the ensemble cast, a found family of oddballs living in and around a small motel, try to come to grips with "Gav the Gov's" shelter in place order. They couldn't possibly be more disparate; plucked from different cultures, socioeconomic strata, backgrounds, orientations, and family makeups, they're knitted together by circumstances and their apparently genuine fondness for one another.

Faced with an indisputably murdered corpse, they are determined to sleuth out the guilty party and set about investigating in their own inimitable way. The "whodunit" and "how" is an impressively funny comedy of errors which reads like a cross between I Love Lucy, Scooby-Doo, and Queer Eye, with a little comedic Lost in Translation for good measure.

Despite being the first book which I've read in the series, it worked quite well as a standalone and I didn't have any trouble keeping the principal characters straight in my head. All the dispararate subplots wind together quickly into a satisfying (and exciting) denouement and resolution. The author has quite a talent with comedic timing and characterization and even surprised a few laughs out of me.

I was engaged enough with the main characters and enjoyed the read so much that I fully intend to go back and read the previous books in the series more or less immediately. There are potential discomfort warnings: discussions of spousal abuse, psychological trauma, anxiety/OCD, blood, and murder. The language is (mostly) clean and there's very little sexual content - (consensual, in context, and not explicit).

Four and a half stars. Definitely a good one for fans of comedic light murder cozies. I love the setup of a group of folks of such divergent backgrounds living in a found-community in a motel.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.