Writers Read: Catriona McPherson

Thursday, November 13, 2025

Catriona McPherson

Catriona McPherson was born in Scotland and lived there until 2010, then immigrated to California where she lives on Patwin ancestral land.

A former academic linguist, she now writes full-time. Her multi-award-winning and national best-selling work includes: the Dandy Gilver historical detective stories, the Last Ditch mysteries, set in California, and a strand of contemporary standalone novels including Edgar-finalist The Day She Died and Mary Higgins Clark finalist Strangers at the Gate. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, The Crimewriters’ Association, The Society of Authors and Sisters in Crime, of which she is a former national president.

McPherson's new novel is Scot's Eggs.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. McPherson's reply:

I've been injured and dealing with immobility, surgery and physiotherapy the last few months, which had an effect on my reading. I retreated into comfort. Now, since I'm a crime writer, my idea of comfort is maybe not everyone's. I had read and adored about five of Linda Castillo's seventeen Chief Kate Burkholder, Amish country procedurals. Immediately I got back from the ER, I bought myself the other twelve. I've read eleven and am saving the most recent installment, Rage, for the Christmas holidays. Blimey, they're good. They're pretty violent and not at all cosy - don't let "Amish" or "country" mislead you, but Kate's team of officers at Painter's Mill PD are the best kind of found family. And the plots are brilliant.

In between the Castillos, I also gave myself the gift of Lisa Gardner's Frankie Elkin series, about a freelance cold-case missing-person investigator. She's a loner, a drifter, a bit of a lost soul herself but she's excellent company. There are only four of them so far, but they're an ideal gateway read into any of Gardner's longer series. These four are set in central Boston, remote Wyoming, the hardscrabble end of Tucson, and Hawaii. I opened that one, Still See You Everywhere, the day before my cancelled ten-day trip to Hawaii should have started. Oh, how I laughed.

And now I'm well on the mend and back to my usual habit of reading through the TBR in alphabetical order. (It cuts down on the agonising choice of what to read next.) I was at G for Gardner when I broke off, so I resumed with G for Guha: Puja Guha's nail biting Sirens of Memory, about a Kuwaiti refugee who has been living in Texas for twenty-five years and is about to slam hard into her own past. Both the 1990 sections in the refugee camps and the present-day Texas/DC sections are a masterclass in grinding tension.

Then came Jasmine Guillory's While We Were Dating, a delightful romance about a Hollywood actress, soooo close to A-list stardom, who enlists a fake boyfriend to tease the tabloids into a frenzy, raise her profile, and land the role of her life. Guess what happens! Yes, but watching it unfold is a joy. Don't you love what's going on with the Romance genre recently? I do.

Right now, I'm on page 143 of Tamron Hall's debut, As the Wicked Watch, about a television news reporter who becomes embroiled in the tragic case of a murdered Black child. It's a wonderful if sobering look at over-policing and under-protecting on Chicago's South Side, from one who knows. (I should say, I had no clue who Tamron Hall was when I picked the book up, but I did think her headshot looked extremely glam, for a crime writer!)"