Scot Mist is the fourth cozy(ish) Last Ditch mystery by Catriona McPherson. Released 1st Feb 2022 by Severn 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.
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