It looks like suicide, but it will turn out to be murder.
The body of the owner of the salmon farm on West Uist in the Hebrides is found floating in a fish retention area, a netted seawater area used is fish farming operations. It appears to be suicide, although no one is quite sure why the deceased would have taken his own life.
The death isn’t the only case for Detective Inspector Torquil MacKinnon and his team. Someone has been sending poison pen letters to seemingly everyone in West Uist. Tourquil himself has received one, as had the newspaper editor, local gamekeeper, a restaurant owner, the dead man, and numerous others. What is unsettling is that the letters are becoming increasingly threatening. Plus dead birds are turning up, poisoned, the local environmentalists believe, by the salmon farm and the chemicals it uses.
When the forensic examination confirms that the man didn’t drown where he was found, MacKinnon knows that he now heads a murder investigation. And the bodies begin to pile up.
Keith Moray
Deep and Deadly is the seventh DI Torquil MacKinnon mystery by British writer Keith Moray. It’s a good story but perhaps not as strong as its predecessors; there is considerable plot advancement at the end that might have been a bit more spaced out. There is less of Lachlan MacKinnon, Torquil’s minister uncle who might be a novel all to himself. And while the DI’s wedding is looming, we get very little of his fiancée or his ongoing battle with his superintendent boss.
In addition to seven Inspector MacKinnon novels, Moray has also published three historical novels, The Pardoner’s Crime, The Fool’s Folly, and The Curse of the Body Snatchers; non-fiction books (under the pen name Keith Souter); and several westerns as Clay Moore. When he’s not writing, he practices medicine as a part-time doctor and medical journalist (he studied medicine at the University of Dundee). He lives in Yorkshire in England.
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