I can easily see these books becoming my favorite cozy mystery series. I’ve listened to the first two as audiobooks read by Anthony Ferguson and found them both to be humorous and entertaining. In this one Constable Hamish MacBeth attends a large house party where one of the guests is found dead the following day. Was it an accident? Macbeth thinks no. All of the characters are so well described it was easy to keep track of who’s who and the big reveal was a complete surprise. The next audiobook has a different narrator so I don’t know if I’ll go with it or try the print version instead but I do know I’ll be going on with this series. ( )

Light and frothy, but still an interesting mystery. Did not see the ending coming, but it was there in the clues. ( )

2.5*
I thought that this 2nd book in the Hamish Macbeth series was an improvement over the first book. However, the culprit was obvious to me long before Hamish figured it out & the trope of the incompetent superior officer was beginning to wear thin. ( )

Enjoyable cozy crime audiobook 3.5* ( )

The second in the series featuring Hamish Macbeth, Death of a Cad, focuses on the richest family in Lochdubh and the people they've invited to their home to meet their daughter's fiancé. This is one of those police procedural stories where the majority of the action takes place in a drafty castle with a cast of characters that are truly hard to root for...especially the guy that ends up biting it. (Imagine if you went to read this and discovered that he had died from biting into something truly heinous. I will neither confirm nor deny this is how he came to his sticky end. (See now you're wondering if he was smothered by honey.)) The dearly departed in this story is a pretty deplorable person who seems to have slept around with every woman in a 10 mile radius while offending every man he came into contact with...so the pool of suspects is WIDE. (Is that supposed to be deep?) The underlying plotline of the book is Hamish and the lord of the manor's daughter having a somewhat complicated relationship. Hamish is hopelessly in love but knows that he would not be accepted by this hoity toity family while the lady in question has never seen him as a possibility until she's seen him in direct comparison to the man she's supposed to be marrying. DRAMA. ROMANCE. MURDER. What more do you want in a mystery?! ( )