Death of a Cad (Hamish Macbeth Series #2) by M. C. Beaton

Death of a Cadby jjamros

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February 09, 2009: I love MC Beaton's books, and just wish she could write faster!

I Also Recommend: Evanly Bodies.

Meet Constable Hamish Macbeth of Scotlandby Anonymous

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October 06, 2008: Hamish Macbeth is a Highlands Scot in his 30s, with a passel of much younger siblings back at home with his impoverished parents. Hamish is in love with young Priscilla Halburton-Smythe of Tommel Castle, only child of the Colonel and his wife. She just might fall in love with her old chum Hamish, except that it would break the hearts of her upwardly mobile gentrified parents. In any case, Hamish can't marry anyone till, by tradition, his next oldest brother can support the family. And that won't be soon, since the young genius is about to head off to university. *** So Hamish Macbeth is content to be a government hack, Constable of the small village of Lochdubh on an isolated sea loch in Sutherland in northwestern Scotland. For the sake of his younger brothers and sisters he scrimps and hoards every pence from his meagre salary to send home. He also saves on food bills by raising chickens and ducks and by mooching as many cups of tea and coffee, free scones and meals as he can from local shopkeepers and fisher folk. Nor is he above selling the fish or fowl he confiscates from poachers. *** A year earlier (DEATH OF A GOSSIP), Constable Macbeth had cannily solved his first murder mystery, being careful, be it said, to avoid promotion and removal from his soft but rewarding small-town job, by giving a superior officer the richly undesrved credit. Now he is about to face two more murders. His beloved Priscilla has brought home from London a fiance and her parents are hosting guests for a few days to meet 40-ish playwright Henry Withering, fresh from the smash success of his frothy upper-class farce DUCHESS DARLING. For the rest of the book we are left wondering why on earth this once darling of Marxists and radicals had stooped to such light-weight silliness after a decade of grinding out realistic portrayals of the poor and oppressed. *** The novel's 'Cad' is soon introduced, Captain Peter Bartlett of the Highland Dragoons, he of unspeakably bad manners when drunk, otherwise an irresistible ladies man. Bartlett enrages just about every person in the house party, including three women he beds one after another the eve and night of 'the Glorious Twelfth,' August 12, official beginning of the four month long grouse hunting season in the Highlands. *** Captain Bartlett cheats on a heavy hunting bet he has made with immensely rich shooting-mad Jeremy Pomfret who has joined the party from Perth. For Bartlett goes out hours before the agreed upon time to shoot a brace (two) grouse before Pomfret is even out of bed. The Captain also intends to pick up extra money by delivering the grouse to a waiting helicopter a rich Arab has sent up from London to fetch the birds to adorn his banquet table that evening. Sometime after 9:00 a. m. the Captain's corpse is found hanging from a fence. Apparently, he had accidentally blown a hole through his chest with both barrels of his expensive shotgun. *** It all seems so obvious. Enter Detective Chief Inspector Blair from nearby Strathbane, along with his two sycophantic sidekicks, detective Jimmy Anderson and Harry MacNab. It was Blair whom Mabeth had credited with cracking the earlier case. With characteristic ingratitude, self-love and bullheadedness, Blair now brushes aside the constable's belief that this was murder and orders Hamish to keep hands off. But Hamish will not be denied. Blair so irritates Colonel Halburton-Smythe and his prominent guests that he is...