Scot in a Trap

by Catriona McPherson

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2023 ANTHONY AWARD FOR BEST HUMOROUS NOVEL

In this darkly funny mystery Lexy Campbell's first love turns up dead at the Last Ditch Motel on Thanksgiving . . . and she becomes the prime suspect!

A mysterious object the size of a suitcase, all wrapped in bacon and smelling of syrup, can mean only one thing: Thanksgiving at the Last Ditch Motel. This year the motel residents are in extra-celebratory mood as the holiday brings a new arrival to the group - a bouncing baby girl.

But as one life enters the Ditch, another leaves it. Menzies Lassiter has only just checked in. When resident counsellor Lexy Campbell tries to deliver his breakfast the next day, she finds him checked out. Permanently. Shocking enough if he was a stranger, but Lexy recognises that face. Menzies was her first love until he broke her heart many years ago.

What's he doing at the Last Ditch? What's he doing dead? And how can Lexy escape the fact that she alone had the means, the opportunity - and certainly the motive - to kill him?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448307845
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Series:	A Last Ditch mystery , #6
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	814,563
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born and raised in West Lothian, Catriona McPherson left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics and worked in academia, as well as banking and public libraries, before taking up full-time writing in 2001. For the last ten years she has lived in Northern California with frequent visits home. Among numerous prizes, she has won two of Left Coast Crime's coveted Humorous Lefty Awards for the Last Ditch comedies.

www.catrionamcpherson.com

Born and raised in Edinburgh, Catriona McPherson left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics and worked in academia, as well as banking and public libraries, before taking up full-time writing in 2001. For the last ten years she has lived in Northern California with a black cat and a scientist. In 2020 she has been shortlisted for a third Mary Higgins Clark Award, for Strangers at the Gate, and won a Left Coast Crime 2020 Lefty Award for the Best Humorous Mystery for Scot and Soda.

Editorial Reviews

10/10/2022

A touch of pathos lifts McPherson’s darkly amusing fifth mystery featuring Scottish family therapist Lexy Campbell (after Scot Mist). In November 2020, the permanent residents of the Last Ditch Motel in Cuento, Calif., who have bonded during the Covid lockdown, are sharing a Thanksgiving dinner. When a heavily pregnant guest goes into labor, Lexy, a temporary resident, agrees to help out at the motel while others attend to the birth. The next morning, she dutifully prepares a breakfast tray for a new arrival, only to find him lying dead, a bullet hole in his forehead. Lexy recognizes him as Menzies Lassiter, her first love from her school days in Dundee, whom she hasn’t seen in close to two decades. As the only person who knew the deceased, Lexy becomes the main suspect. She must not only investigate Menzies’s murder but also delve into their fraught shared past. Certainly, she had motive enough to want him dead. This time the motel residents are the ones providing Lexy emotional support. McPherson keeps the laughs and the action rolling along. With any luck, Lexy will be back soon. Agent: Lisa Moylett, Coombs Moylett Maclean. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

The banter among the various characters will draw Janet Evanonvich fans to this engaging, not-quite-a-locked-room mystery

Booklist on Scot Mist

An engaging plot, eccentric characters, plenty of humor

Booklist

2022-11-16
A Scot living in California continues to get tripped up by American ways and American English.

Therapist Lexy Campbell lives on a houseboat behind the Last Ditch Motel, where her floridly eccentric friends have gathered for her second Thanksgiving in the U.S. The Covid lockdown they’ve lived through was easy compared to the nerve-wracking wait for Della, her overdue friend, to give birth. Having offered Della and Dylan the use of the houseboat for the delivery, Lexy’s moved with her boyfriend, Taylor, to the motel only to be awakened by the squalling newborn. Asked to deliver breakfast to an actual paying guest, Lexy finally realizes his silence is due to a bullet in the head. When their pal Sgt. Molly Rankinson announces that this isn’t a case of suicide, Taylor reckons that they were awakened at 3 a.m. by a noise Lexy now thinks was a silenced gunshot, and only then heard the baby crying. Though Lexy and her pals have solved a number of murder cases, she realizes that she’s in trouble when she recognizes the dead man as Menzies Lassiter, her boyfriend back in Scotland when she was 17. Even more disconcertingly, her mother tells her that Menzies had recently visited her to find out where Lexy was living. Lexy’s been lying to herself about why they broke up, but now the truth must come out, especially when her cast-iron alibi is challenged by new information about the time of death.

A wildly funny, deadly serious look at misogyny and sexual abuse.

Kirkus Reviews