Book Review: Dressed to Kilt

I know, I know, you’re totally ready to scream enough cozy mysteries, aren’t you? Well guess what, this is the end my friend. I have read or tried to read every cozy mystery on the shelves at six different libraries. Dressed to Kilt by Hannah Reed is the last one to get a full review. Although you will see a number of them on my One Star rehash at the end of fourth quarter.

This was a fun little mystery. Set in a small hamlet in Scotland, I felt like Reed did a good job of giving the book a Scottish flair which I enjoyed. However she did a less good job with really placing her setting. Things floated, if you know what I mean. The accented lines were flavorful but still readable. Reed included a rude idiot American, allowing for lots of Scots terminology and colloquialisms to be explained without a full “as you know bob” going on.

The book includes three mysteries in one. A) the actual murder. B) the story behind her father’s disappearance 30 years earlier. And C) which guy?  I was super on board. Really grooving. Really wondering. And then 180 pages in, it happened. A flaw in the story logic so large I’m surprised it didn’t cause a rip in the time space continuum. As a character is being arrested she insists she has never met a certain person nor been to the local hospital before to the inspector and the deputy. And no one calls her on it. It flies. I had to go back and check but yep the day before the inspector, the same one, had driven this character to the local hospital to visit said person.

I finished the book but the bloom was off. The ending was disappointing. It was all gray. Overcast. Besmirched by bad story logic.

Rating this one is difficult.

Overall: ℘℘, two pages. I finished this book after the logic debacle out of sheer stubbornness. And to see if she hooks up with the inspector who is a much better match for her than the idiot she’s currently dating.

For the plot, characters, and writing: ℘℘℘℘, four pages. Really well done. But that one instance just sticks too far in my craw for me to get over it.