"Death at a Shetland Festival" by Marsali Taylor

 When a famous folk musician is stabbed at a folk festival, supersleuth Cass Lynch and Gavin her policeman boyfriend are in the audience. Is the death connected with the diary Cass has found and with the lochside death of a young girl, both of which happened many years ago, when the murder victim was on the island?

This is the twelfth in the Shetland Mysteries starring Cass and Gavin and Cat and Kitten (and now Julie, Kitten's kitten). There is perhaps less sailing this time but the book is still full of the wonder of Shetland. The major change is that we, the reader, get to read extracts from the diary which Cass, full of concern for privacy, doesn't. This means that the reader is a step ahead of Cass and the police; it meant that I worked out whodunnit before they did (for almost the first time in the series). I think I enjoyed it even more because I could spot the tiny clues that Cass didn't spot until later. But I don't read the Shetland Mysteries books in order to solve the crime; they are much better than the run of the mill murder mysteries because I have grown to know the characters and I want to see them develop and I adore the setting and the storytelling is simply superb.

I loved the concept of the gorilla video too. It opens up realms of uncertainty in a murder-mystery. I've seen it before and I reacted just as Cass did.

As usual there are some beautiful descriptions and a nail-biting climax. Another page-turner from Ms Taylor.

Selected quotes:

• "A snake's wedding of black cables." (Ch 1)
• "She leaned back in her chair as if her bones wouldn't hold her upright." (Ch 3)
• "Kitten greeted me on the doorstep with a flourish of her pale-tipped tail, then bounded off into the garden. I wasn't sure whether she was supremely confident that Cat wouldn't let anyone kidnap their baby, or whether she was getting bored with motherhood and rather hoped someone would." (Ch 10)
• "You'd still take Gavin and him for twins, but from some eighteenth-century morality tale: the twin who'd embraced virtue, all glowing health ... and the twin who'd embraced vice, with dark pouches under his eyes and dragged-down corners to his mouth." (Ch 12)
• "The grass in the ponies' field was soft green, sprinkled with daisies, and the first yellow marsh marigolds fringed the chuckling burn." (Ch 17)
• "The bright spring greens and yellows  beyond our sit-ootery window were muted, and the trees loomed insubstantial in a sea of white." (Ch 21)

Many thanks to the author for providing me with a signed copy of this book!

February 2025; 316 pages

Published as a paperback in 2024 by Headline Accent

This is the twelfth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God