Does Your Mother Know by Maureen Jennings

Jennings leaves old Toronto behind, familiar to readers of her Murdoch mysteries, and takes up with a new lead character, Christine Morris, a forensic profiler. With as much casual authority as she evokes Murdoch’s late Victorian Toronto, she offers a remarkably real and accessible Scotland, from Edinburgh to the Outer Hebrides, as the contemporary scene for murder and mystery touching close to her protagonist’s personal welfare. At the same time, a rich sense of the Scottish past opens dimensions of history not normally found in what are known, for want of a better word, as “genre” novels.