Five top mysteries set on islands

Catriona McPherson was born in Scotland and lived there until immigrating to the US in 2010. She writes the multi-award-winning Dandy Gilver series, set in the old country in the 1930s, as well as a strand of multi-award-winning psychological thrillers. Very different awards. After eight years in the new country, she kicked off the humorous Last Ditch Motel series, which takes a wry look at California life. These are not multi-award-winning, but the first two won the same award in consecutive years, which still isn’t too shabby.

[My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide; The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.]

McPherson is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

Her latest Dandy Gilver mystery is The Turning Tide.

At CrimeReads, McPherson tagged five of her favorite mystery plots set on islands, including:

The Island: Tregarrick / Tresco / Burgh
The Novel: Death at High Tide

My island-hopping tour of crime fiction comes full circle with Hannah Dennison’s Death at High Tide. It takes place on the Isles of Scilly, specifically on a tidal island that’s half Tresco and half Christie’s Burgh, only with a much dowdier hotel. I’m a longtime fan of Dennison’s writing and would have followed her to any setting, but a recent widow and her sister mysteriously inheriting a run-down, once splendid, Art Deco pile and hot-footing it off there? I couldn’t have been more in. The writing of recent grief is sharp and convincing, but the book has a sunny nature overall. Like Ann Cleeves’ Shetland books, it’s pitch-perfect on the feuds and friendships, alliances and claustrophobia, of an isolated community. The relationship between the sisters is appealing and authentic and the dangers of fog, tides, and cliffs are to the fore. If I’d read this as a kid, I might never have gone on all those stealth picnics to Cramond.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue