Tag: Highland Folk Museum

A post about one of the milestones in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries series

This is the beautiful shoulder bag that I bought this summer at the Harris Tweed shop in Inverness this summer. It’s the repository for my research for the eighth book in my Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I’d planned to make it only (!) a seven-book series, but this summer’s trip to the Highlands planted an indelible germ of an idea for an eighth adventure following on after the seven-book cycle has run the course of the village year.

Sophie will take Hector to meet her parents, who live and work in Inverness, and inevitably a local mystery will ensue there, with a series of attempts on Hector’s life, and taking them all over this vibrant Highland city just above Loch Ness, to the Highland Folk Museum (our favourite museum in the world), the remarkable Leakey’s Bookshop, and into the Highland wilderness.

The Handbag Vanishes…

The bag has already been involved in a mystery of its own. I realised a couple of day after we’d unpacked our camper van at the end of our summer trip to Scotland, with my husband unloading while I put everything away in our house, that my precious new bag had not made it back into the house. My husband swore blind he had emptied the van, and that there was nothing left in there at all.  I started to doubt my own memory – had I put it away in the house in such a safe place and forgotten where I’d put it?

I started to doubt my own memory – had I put it away in the house in such a safe place and forgotten where I’d put it?

A few weeks later, on a trip out in the van with his best friend, when they were turning the van inside out in search of his friend’s missing glasses (his friend had put Gordon’s on by mistake, and said “These glasses don’t work”), he told me again that the bag was nowhere to be found.

They would certainly have found it this time, Gordon told me, especially after his friend had found his glasses.

In despair – as I had stuffed the bag full of notes, brochures, ideas, and postcards as I roamed around Inverness on our final day there – I made a special trip to the van to see for myself. There on top of my husband’s sleeping bag lay the missing bag.

Needless to say, I won’t be asking him for advice on detection techniques any time soon.

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Meanwhile, I’m on the home straits with book #3 in the series, Murder in the Manger, which will be published on 6th November as a Christmas special. It’s already available to pre-order as an ebook on Amazon, and the paperback will be published at the same time.

And in the meantime, the second book in the series will provide a topical seasonal read. The story in Trick or Murder? kick off right about now, and runs through Halloween (31st October) and Guy Fawkes’ Night (5th November).

Here’s the buying link to the series so far on Amazon – or you can order the books from your local independent bookshop by quoting the title, my name, and the ISBN.

There’s also more information about the series on my website here.