North Sea Requiem (Joanne Ross)
It’s 1958 in the Highlands of Scotland. A small weekly newspaper covers social events, animal sales, and sports. When the wife of the coach of a local shinty (the precursor of ice hockey) team finds a severed leg in the boot of one of the team uniforms she is cleaning, it’s big news. When that same woman is disfigured in an acid attack, the incident crosses from grotesque prank to violent assault. The heroine of this series, Joanne Ross, is a woman who escaped an abusive husband, found a job as a typist at the paper, and now works as a full-fledged reporter for the Highland Gazette. Besides covering the ghastly news of the misplaced leg and the acid attack, Ross does some enterprising reporting on a glamorous American jazz singer searching for information on her husband, whose aircraft went down in the North Sea during WWII. This is not as spare and well crafted as the previous three mysteries in the series (too much information on nitpicking of children’s heads, literally). But it’s still an atmospheric mystery, with a wonderful, plucky reporter-heroine. --Connie Fletcher