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Book Reviewed by:As a decade of change comes to a close, murder hits close to home in a small Scottish town...
On a dark, damp Sunday evening, a man taking a shortcut home sees a hand reaching out in supplication from a bundle of sacks. In an instant he knows something terrifying has happened.
On a dark, damp Sunday evening, a man taking a shortcut home sees a hand reaching out in supplication from a bundle of sacks. In an instant he knows something terrifying has happened.
In the Highlands in the late 1950s, much of the local newspaper's success was due to Mrs. Smart, the no-nonsense office manager who kept everything and everyone in line. Her murder leaves her colleagues in shock and the Highland Gazette office in chaos. Joanne Ross, a budding reporter and shamefully separated mother, assumes Mrs. Smart's duties, but an intriguing stranger provides a distraction not only from the job and the investigation but from everything Joanne believes in.
Beneath the Abbey Wall brilliantly evokes a place still torn between the safety of the past and the uncertainty of the future, when rock 'n' roll and television invaded homes, and a change in attitudes still came slowly for many. As the staff of the Highland Gazette probes the crime, they uncover secrets deeply rooted in the past, and their friend's murder becomes the perfect fodder for strife and division in the town and between her colleagues.
A. D. Scott weaves charged emotion into Beneath the Abbey Wall, a well-paced novel that bridges the gap between British “gentleman detective” mysteries – which include characters such as Hercule Poirot, Inspector Morse, and Adam Dagliesh, among others, and which often entail ingenious executions of a crime – and hardboiled police procedurals that suggest bleak views of humanity...continued
Full Review
(420 words)
(Reviewed by Karen Rigby).
One of the plot details in Beneath the Abbey Wall involves a family of Travellers whose histories twine with the murder victim's – Jimmy McPhee, and his mother Jenny McPhee, a highly regarded storyteller.
In Scotland, the Traveller population is referred to by the government as Scottish Gypsies/Travellers (distinct from Irish Travellers), though the names members use to refer to themselves varies by region. Travellers is more common in the Highlands, while Gypsies is used in the Lowlands and Border areas, with some regarding Gypsies as derogatory, preferring Romas instead. (For more on the Roma people in Britain, view the Beyond the Book for An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear.) Scotland also includes New Travellers, ...
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Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of Hush Now, Don't You Cry
Beautifully written and atmospheric, Beneath the Abbey Wall transports the reader to the bleakness of Scotland after World War II. This has everything I enjoy in a book: a terrific sense of place, real people, complicated relationships and a suspenseful peeling away of layers of back-story.
