Bookish Take on a BBC Scotland Mystery Series

Joanna Bourne, Historical Romance

A good long while back I got a recommendation from a librarian for a Historical Romance Mystery author Marion Chesney. I tried a couple but was not blown away by them. I wondered why this author was in the library in hardback at a time when almost no genre Romance was.

(It is no criticism of an author that she does not blow me away. I am picky and capricious.)

Much later, in the mid 1990s, in seemingly unrelated news, I very much
enjoyed the BBC Scotland TV cozy mystery series Hamish MacBeth. I love BBC Mysteries.

Years after that I came across the Mystery author M.C. Beaton who’d written Hamish Macbeth.
I enjoyed written Hamish very much, though they’re not much like the TV programs. It’s one of those fairly rare cases where both the book and the series please me.

You’ve already guessed that M.C. Beaton and Marion Chesney are the same person, Marion Gibbons (née Chesney). You are clever that way.

Beaton also wrote a Mystery series Agatha Raisin which I don’t like as well because the protagonist annoys me more than Hamish does.

She wrote129 books so you may have some great backlist to enjoy.

Death of a Gossip is first in the Hamish Macbeth series here.
The Quiche of Death is first in Agatha Raisin’s series. Here.

 and a Marion Chesney Snobbery With Violence here.

RITA-winning author Joanna Bourne writes historical fiction set in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Regency England. It was a time of love and sacrifice, clashing ideals, and really cool clothing.