A whodunit where an old Scottish lovesong by Robert Burns is the vital clue. There's a mad bomber at large, a bumbling amateur in pursuit.
Scotland’s national poet inspires a murder tale released to coincide with his 250th anniversary year.
Robert Burns (1759-1796, “A man’s a man for all that”) is revered as a people’s poet who penned eternal down-to-earth philosophy.
Using this, the novel “Murder Piping Hot” by whodunit diva Ann Morven scatters clues for the shrewd after an exploding haggis pudding poses the first puzzle. Can dynamite be boiled? Aha! Send for Inspector Sheryl Holmes, pedantic descendant of you-know-who.
The smarter sleuthing, however, comes from an amateur, familiar to Ann Morven fans, none other than the heavyweight chump of crime fiction, Sheil B. Wright. She’s a dunce at deduction but well versed in human frailty.
Overweight on the scales, overdrawn at the bank and nudging forty, the trouble-prone folksinger is hired to play bagpipes at a millionaire’s Burns Night.
Sole survivor, she herself becomes a suspect and, later, prey to the killer.
Bonnie Jean, an old Burns lovesong, holds a vital clue. So does a long lost manuscript of lewd poems by the passionate poet.
Bumbling along this modern murder trail, Sheil also discovers the truth about the 317-year-old Glencoe Massacre. She’s a busy lass for sure, aye, yet still finds time, between murders, to warble her ballads.
Released by Booktaste.com in digital format only, the novel is published by Darling Newspaper Press and priced at $7.95. A sample read is free online at most ebook retailers.
Excerpt
MY gut twisted when the knife-wielder declared he was digging a trench of gushing entrails. The grisly words accompanied the scooping dance of a ten-inch blade.
Onlookers in evening dress, grouped within Macarthur’s Great Hall, growled obscene anticipation. Gushing entrails, yum!
Again the threatening thrust above the victim, a pudding on a silver platter, and more visceral verse . . . "Trenching your gushing entrails bright, like any ditch. And then, oh what a glorious sight! Warm, reeking, rich."
Standing in my overtight skirt of Woolworths tartan, near the doomed haggis, my face ballooned, my fingers wiggled, and my bagpipes waited to caterwaul. The guests saluted with their whiskies and chanted the litany:
"Fair fall your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the pudding race."
Big belly girthed in a kilt, Lord Macarthur glared and grinned, smoothed his fair and thinning locks, and boasted in a brogue adopted for the occasion: "My famous ancestorr stole Spain's merino and introduced it to Austrrraalia. Ladies and gents, what have I personally given? Mineral riches is what. Ironore, nickel, gold. And most of all I have given myself."
With this the tartan tycoon made a final stab to conclude the slicing ceremony, and vanished in a blast that was no part of it, his fragmented flesh mixing noisily with the minced sheep's liver, barley and oatmeal. His remains, they said later, could not be separated from any piece of that dinner.
News headlines immortalised the exploding haggis. More to the point, they included a secondary snippet of informaton which, to me, was actually the most important: SOLE SURVIVOR FAT SHEIL
I think that's what one newspaper said, but I've never been able to find it in any of the archives. Maybe tormented memory plays tricks when a gal's nudging forty, or it could be that an accurate memory recalls only crazy thoughts that came amid the chaos.
"Sheil mate, gerrup for cripes sake."
A human voice, a living voice. "Blimey mate, you's heavier than a king boomer."
The banners of oblivion dissolve. The person likening me to a bull kangaroo heaves me to a sitting position, the mist becomes the black-moon face of Billy Boomerang, the gardener.
"Glad yer alive," he grunts, "but you blurry landed on me best bottlebrush."
A grumpy gorilla, this Billy, his potato nose and corrugated brow chiding me while I ache all over. "Your plant saved me, Billy. Ouch!" I had been trying to get up and this movement brought a terminal sigh from broken twigs beneath me in the soft flowerbed. I knew how they were feeling.
"Mate," the gorilla complained, "that bugger was just about to bud. Now you broke him."
"I couldn't help it, okay?"
Yet he continued his tirade of lament. "I brung them seeds ten-thou blurry miles from Arabia. Grow-n-graft him beaut. Now your big butt squash him dead."
"Wheest Billy!" Lady Fiona's command came from a halo of silver hair in the shadows. "Your banksia is the least of it. There are 18 people confirmed dead so far, including Macarthur. Go to the ambulance men at once and offer your strength in the rubble. There is a corpse they cannot reach."
Her words sent the slope-shouldered hulk scurrying away, and she turned her attention to me. "You must forgive Billy. He’s a bit . . . let us say unworldly. "
Since I'd slumped flat on my back again, and since she was at full vertical stretch, this command seemed to come from a long way up. "He accuses the Almighty of racial bias in failing to create a black flower. And he is bent on redressing the balance. A government blunder, you see, granted him a study trip to the Middle East. Something involving desert flora. Now he dedicates the black banksia to his dear dead mother, eight months gone."
She stooped to brush a bud from my eyebrow, coming nearer my level.
"Unfortunately for Billy, but miraculously for you, your bulk crushed his best spinulosa, the pride of his very first crop."
Black banksias? Unheard of colour, perhaps handy at funerals. I regarded the floral shambles, easing my knuckles away from a jagged leaf and noticing that someone had bandaged my right wrist rather professionally and, with less precision, had tossed a tartan rug over me.
"The doctor said best to leave you. You were comfortable in the dirt and where else could we have put you? So many others." She sighed, a keening sound that made me shiver despite the rug. "Dead or disfigured all."
She was taut as a celtic harp, her dinner gown a splendid white column but its front horribly smeared with blood and worse. Yet, at the edge of hysteria, she was somehow achieving control. In the murk and smoke she was a stoic statue of dignity. Her sash of dark-green plaid was secured by a huge circular brooch, an amber gem that flared with reflected lights, as did her eyes. These, I noted, were hard, green and fierce.
The third book in the funny Silver Sisters Mysteries series. The twins and their 80 year-old mother and uncle get into trouble sleuthing in Sin City.
Paperback, Kindle, eBook, Audiobook
All Carson Reno Mystery Series Books are standalone novels. It is not necessary to read them in any particular order.
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