Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston novels The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, The Reluctant Matador, The Paris Librarian, The Sorbonne Affair, The Book Artist and the newly released The French Widow, as well as the novels Hollow Man and Dominic. He has also published the true-crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children.
At CrimeReads, Pryor tagged eight "fish-out-of-water crime novels [that] drop their American protagonists across the ocean and into hot water," including:
Plaid and Plagiarism, Molly MacRaeRead about another entry on the list.
Setting: Scotland
Let us remain in the British Isles, but head north to Scotland for this cozy mystery book and series. Our protagonist is a retired American librarian Janet Marsh who has bought a bookshop on Scotland’s west coast,along with three other women. Deadly shenanigans ensue, as you’d imagine. When I asked Molly why she chose that locale to set the series, she said: “I lived in Scotland in the mid-70s, as a student at Edinburgh University. This series is my way of going back to a place I love and can’t get to often enough in real life.” I have long said to my friends who set books in upstate New York (looking at you, Ziskin) or east Texas: there’s a jolly good reason so many of us set our books abroad—research! Anyway, on to the story….
This is the first in the popular series and is set in the weeks before the annual Inversgail Literature Festival in Scotland. It starts with our protagonist Janet Marsh being told she’ll have to wait before moving into her new home. Then she finds out the house has been vandalized. Again. The chief suspect? Una Graham, an advice columnist for the local paper—who’s trying to make a name for herself as an investigative reporter. When Janet and her business partners go looking for clues at the house, they find a body—it’s Una, in the garden shed, with a sickle in her neck.
Who wanted Una dead? After discovering a cache of nasty letters, Janet and her friends are beginning to wonder who didn’t, including Janet’s ex-husband. Surrounded by a cast of characters with whom readers will fall in love, the new owners of Yon Bonnie Books set out to solve Una’s murder so they can get back to business.
My Book, The Movie: Plaid and Plagiarism.
The Page 69 Test: Plaid and Plagiarism.
--Marshal Zeringue
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