Loved it!!!!! This is just the book I was looking for this Christmas season!  The Christmasy part is NOT just slapped onto a fair mystery. This time we have some skullduggery based on the town’s new Christmas tree and decorations as well as a long-missing husband plus Hamish trying to date the new schoolteacher – and him with his bad-luck love-life.   

A Highland Christmas ~
by M.C. Beaton -2h 7m
read by Graham Malcolm
Rating: A / cozy mystery
(#`15 in Hamish Macbeth series)

A chunk of the Scottish community is quietly Calvinist and do NOT readily take to holiday doings, or a lot of other things as it turns out.

The story opens with a lighted Christmas tree stolen from the community war memorial.  This was their first community tree because of the old religious sentiments, but times are changing.  

Hamish McBeth:  Police Constable who patrols and keeps tabs on the windswept terrain of Lochdubh, Scotland. McBeth is the protagonist of the series. 

Blaire: Detective Chief Inspector – Hamish’ boss who despises McBeth.
 
Mrs Gallagher: An older women whose cat goes missing and calls the police supervisor when that happens. Blaire gets on Hamish and he goes to check but Gallagher suspects her house has been broken into in spite of all her locks, bars, and bolts.  When he arrives she offers him a drink. Her husband is missing too and she really hopes she’s a widow by now.  He asks for more information and she tells him he was arrested in 1971, so him might very well be dead. Hamish says he’ll look into it.  

Meanwhile, a young girl who is obedient and very intelligent is being raised by her very strict Calvinist parents who will not allow her to celebrate Christmas or eat candy or go to movies. They have plenty of money and say they love her so she even has her own apartment on the top floor – but she has no friends.

Meanwhile another woman has moved to town and she’s a schoolteacher. Apparently Hamish has been having a rough time in the romance department. The new woman is called an “incomer” – and “once an incomer, always an incomer.” There is a very brief shootout at a remote trailer but otherwise this is fairly non-violent.

In this case the book # in the series is #1.5 and only 2 hours and a few minutes long. What this means to me lately is that it gives me a chance to sample the author. (I’ve seen Beaton’s name, but never read the books) but I do enjoy a good series. 

I’ve tried some series by reading the Christmas novel first (Crewel Yule by Monica Ferris or 23rd Christmas by James Paterson and Maxine Paetro or David Rosenfeld’s ) and sometimes I love them and start the whole series from book 1, or I don’t really like the book and put the whole series away. (With Rosenfeld I loved the Christmas book, didn’t care much for the others, so now I read the annual Christmas novesl – ever since 2016.) This year there seem to be more of them on the market and although I have a few other books in mind to read this monty, I’ll be reading maybe 10 this month including one for New Years which I already found. 😁