A review by easnyder
A Cold Highland Wind by Tasha Alexander

3.0

A menagerie in the Scottish Highlands? A doctor in a remote Scottish Highland village with extensive experience in autopsy? Ok, I’ll attempt to willingly suspend my disbelief and look past those rather incredible details. Oh, and here we are once again, jumping back and forth between completely separate stories in different time periods with only the most tenuous connection between the two. As seems to usually be the case, there’s absolutely nothing about the story from the past that is in any way really relevant to the mystery, simply “here’s a story from the past set in the same place, with something which a character in the past owned which is now present in the background of the mystery.” Now to my surprise, I actually found myself enjoying the “past” story more than the actual “present mystery.” Usually I find the jump back in time chapters tedious and annoying (and I may be guilty of bypassing that part of the story altogether in some past Lady Emily books). But in this case it was the actual mystery timeline which was the tedious one. A key theme in the story is how everyone in this village seems to know everything about everyone else in the village, all the goings on in the village, all the comings and goings…and yet, NO ONE in this very well informed place were aware of the vicar’s wife’s infidelity, her pregnancy/loss, and no one witnessed the victim’s murder. To say nothing of the way that Emily & Colin are being led around by the nose by all these people who seemingly know everything and yet never anything of use. There even seems to be a lot of contradictory info being shared by all these people and never do Emily or Colin seem to notice.

And of course there’s Jeremy, who has made it his life’s ambition to be useless for (checks notes) 16 prior books in which he’s been part of Emily & Colin’s murder investigations, and suddenly does a 180 and decides that perhaps that’s not who he wants to be anymore?

I will say I enjoyed a lot of the characters in this book (Emily & Colin’s children are a bit of a riot) but overall, a very uneven entry in the series.