The Ferryman's Lot

Thirty-five years of murder taught Alec Guthrie one thing: the careful ones come with courtesy.

He was three weeks retired when the letter arrived from his late aunt's solicitor. Netta left him Brae Antiques, a shop at the end of a single-track road in the West Highlands, in a village that prices its incomers by teatime. Guthrie means to value the stock, sell up, and go home.

Then he opens the shop's held post. Lachie Bell, the last ferryman on the loch, has written asking for Netta's eye on "the wee cup" a battered silver quaich his family has kept since 1746. But Lachie is dead at the foot of his own stair, the cup is gone from the dresser, and the only paper proving it ever existed is a red-ink entry in a ledger sixty years deep.

The file says an old man fell. The village says stairs are stairs. Guthrie says nothing at all, and starts reading his aunt's books because somebody with careful hands and a patient knock wants that ledger, and the death was only the beginning of what they came for.

A traditional Scottish mystery of provenance, paper and long memory, for readers who like their crime dry, their villages watchful and their detectives past retirement age. Book 1 of the Highland Antiques Mysteries; each book stands alone.