The Trowie Mound Murders by Marsali Taylor

Cass Lynch once again finds herself the centre of a murder investigation. Art thieves and drug smugglers all play their part in this. The local Trowie Mound, the Shetlan for Neolithic burial mounds, comes under scrutiny as one set of travelers goes missing. It soon becomes apparent that there is a lot more at stake than some missing art.

Another brilliant read with the waters around Shetland playing a key role in what is another very good story. Cass finds herself in the middle of this as she starts off by being a good samaritan and goes looking for some missing boaters that ventured into the hills. She soon becomes the target as the thieves find her at their hiding place and lock her in the Trowie Mound.

Besides all that goes on with the crimes, Cass also starts to have feelings for the Inverness DI that comes to the island a second time to investigate what is going on. There is also Anders, her Norwegian crew mate. This is only a side story and I hope it stays that way but I thought I had to mention it.

A great second story in these Shetland Sailing Mysteries.

Death On A Longship by Marsali Taylor

Cass Lynch is desperate to skipper her own Tallship and crew, sadly she currently works winters as a waitress and summers giving sailing lessons until one day in the restaurant she works in she overhears a conversation. A film crew are looking for a skipper to get a Viking Longship refitted and seaworthy to use on their next film project. Cass immediately puts herself forward.

Once the Longship is ready and the film crew arrives things go well for a while then the lead actress is found dead on the Longship. Along with a few other characters, Cass seems to be the main suspect.

I really enjoyed this, lots of twists and turns. The characters are well written and likeable. In the early chapters we get a lot of introspective thought by Cass about how she has ended up where she now finds herself but the story still moves along nicely and all this introspection has more meaning as the story progresses.

Some of the dialogue is written phonetically in the Shetland dialect. I am not normally a fan of this but in this book it is not overly used and where it is used it is part of someone's character. You can't have a salty old Shetland fisherman talking the Queens English can you?

I have been so lucky in my book choices recently and this was another great read.