M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green. Death of a Spy. Grand Central, 2024.

Well. we were right. The most recent Hamish Macbeth book we reviewed suggested that even though Mrs. Beaton died a few years ago, we have not seen the last of Hamish Macbeth stories. Mrs. Beaton still gets the header on the book cover, but it seems as if Mr. Green wrote the whole story.

This continues the tale of Death of a Traitor. We noted that in that story, Hamish found an encrypted note which implicated three men of the Scottish police force, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair. Death of a Spy moves that thread along. It is no spoiler to say that the death occurs in the first pages of the novel. We may not know right away that the person had been a spy, but since it is nearly the only death in the whole story, the mystery begins immediately.

The staged traffic accident does not occur in Hamish’s bailiwick, but an American acquaintance of his reappears—James Bland. In a previous novel, he appeared as a well-connected tourist, but now we see that he is some kind of special agent. Indeed, his name echoes James Bond, except, uh, blander. His cover is that he is a Chicago policeman on an exchange program with Scotland assigned to accompany Hamish in Lochdubh. Still he shows up in the office of Daviot, Hamish’s boss, with a classified letter referring to the Official Secrets Act.

Yes, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair are above suspicion—at least with respect to official secrets—but there are a dozen other names on the list that need to be examined. It turns out four have died, a fifth is the victim at the beginning of the story, but Bland wants Hamish’s help to track the others down. And in each case there is the mysterious “Boss” who seems to have an undue influence over everyone.

There is a lot of action. Hamish and Bland travel from Glasgow to the Britain’s northernmost point tracking down leads and interviewing people. In Glasgow they have a run-in with the Macgregor gang. Not surprisingly, the sleazy Blair seems to have a connection with them. At another point, Bland realizes they are being tailed. They visit a nuclear reactor that is being deactivated and a Navy ordnance base. Their appearance surprises some people, and other people appear out of nowhere and surprise them.

Meanwhile things are hopping in Lochdubh, Hamish’s home village. A burglar has broken into a number of homes. A few victims get a good look at him, but no one fitting his description is in town. A prominent tattoo should make the ID easy. He is clever. At one point he robs the Italian restaurant where co-owner Lucia stabs him. He grabs her knife and hurls it into the loch. No blood evidence.

And the stone bridge on the only road into Lochdubh has washed out. Hamish rescues the grocer Mr. Patel who is stuck on the bridge and manages to get an engineering crew to begin rebuilding the bridge the next day and put in a temporary structure in the meantime. The crew of seven disrupts things a bit in town as they like to visit the pub after work each day.

The site supervisor is a woman who takes a shine to Hamish. She enters the Tommel Castle hotel arm in arm with Hamish only to be greeted by Priscilla and Elspeth and Claire. Priscilla and Elspeth are both former fiancées of Hamish. Priscilla happens to have come from London to visit her family who runs the hotel, and Elspeth has come from Glasgow to report on the bridge outage. Claire is Hamish’s current flame who has been waiting for half an hour for a date with Hamish that he forgot about with all the goings-on. Hamish just cannot get it right with women…

There is a lot going on in this story throughout the Scottish countryside. Most of the recurring characters from previous tales show up, the three policemen and three women mentioned before, most of the regular townspeople, Blair’s wife Mary, Daviot’s secretary Helen, among others. This is less a mystery than some and more of a action-adventure or thriller, but readers should get a kick out of Death of a Spy. We understand that while others may consider Hamish lucky in the way he solves crimes, we see that he really is pretty savvy.