Kirkcudbright Crime Writing

The latest crime novel by best-selling author Aline Templeton has been published by Joffe Books, the eighth in her hugely popular Detective Marjory Fleming Mysteries.

The stories are set in Galloway and Murder in Dunmore, which was previously published under the title Bad Blood, features events in a village where forty years ago, an eight-year-old boy was beaten to death in a field by a killer who was just ten years old.

Marnie Bruce returns to the area to find out what happened the night her mother disappeared but Dunmore wants her gone as she threatens to reveal old secrets.

When a woman is found murdered on the exact spot where the boy’s body was discovered, DI Fleming is called in.

It’s the one case she hoped never to face again because she knows more about the night Marnie’s mother vanished than she has ever admitted and someone in Dunmore has kept a deadly secret for forty years and is prepared to kill to ensure the truth does not come out.

It’s a brilliant set-up and the novel is Aline Templeton at her best. Her writing prompted Val McDermid to describe her as the ‘crime tzar for the Scottish small town.’