Writers Read: Catriona McPherson

Monday, September 16, 2024

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 The Witching Hour.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

The brief for this assignment is very clear: do not simply list the books you’ve read. However, if anyone’s interested, everything I’ve read since December 2019 is on this page of my website.

But what have I been reading recently that I want to shout about?

Shannon Baker, a longtime resident of the Nebraska sandhills (although she now lives in Arizona), writes the Sheriff Kate Fox series of police procedurals. Or are they? Kate is one of a large family in a small town, where old feuds and fresh gossip confound every case she encounters. The landscape and lifestyle are brutal but the writing is lush and the stories are always absorbing, whether the background is the plight of migrant workers, the intricacies of policing the reservation or, as in the one I’ve just read, the big business of bucking bulls.

Still in the crime-fiction genre, but a different kettle of fish entirely, I thoroughly enjoyed Janice Hallett’s latest. Hallett writes her novels in the form of emails, texts, transcribed conversations, memos and the occasional news report. When I embarked on The Appeal (her debut), I didn’t expect there to be much characterisation. Shows what I know! The appalling cast of characters in the Fairway amateur dramatic society came rolling of the page and the two true-crime journalists in The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels are no different. Airtight plotting and car crash interpersonal drama – irresistible.

Right now I’m reading James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, seventy-five pages in to . . . a lot. It’s not in the crime genre, but like so much of the best literary fiction there is a puzzle about a crime right in its heart. Mind you, I reckon even if there was no plot whatsoever I’d read on, for McBride’s sharp but warm depiction of the Jewish and Black residents of Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pa, who sometimes join hands and sometimes lock horns in their struggle to survive, thrive and prosper in the middle decades of the twentieth century. And I’ve fallen in love with Chona, who interrupts the Rabbi to point out mistakes, who will not give up her grocery store and take it easy, no matter that her husband Moshe could now afford to keep her, who is determined to stay on Chicken Hill where she was born. I have no idea what’s going to happen in this novel but I’m all in.