Murder at the Highland Games is the fourth book in the Ally McKinley Mysteries by Dee MacDonald, a brilliant cozy mystery series set in a tiny Highland village of Locharran.
Title: Murder at the Highland Games
Author: Dee MacDonald
Series: An Ally McKinley Mystery#4
First Published: April 16, 2026
Genres: Mystery
Acquired: from the publisher and tour organiser Books on Tour
*** Thank you to the publisher, Bookouture, and organiser Books on Tour, for inviting me on this tour and sending me an eARC of this book via NetGalley for review purposes
It’s the annual Locharran Highland Games and Ally McKinley has never seen her little village so busy or excited. Everyone’s enjoying the Scottish dancing, the bagpipes, and cheering the competitors on. But there’s a hitch in the proceedings when champion challenger Archie Armstrong drops dead in the middle of tossing the caber. Rushing to the scene, Ally is the first to spot that Archie’s death was no accident – this was murder!
Ally flings herself into a new investigation and soon discovers that more than one person may have had a murderous motive, including some of the current residents of her cosy little guesthouse. Patti, Archie’s glamourous wife, seems intent on acting like the perfect widow, but rumours of infidelity have been flying. Is her performance too good? Could her uncle, cranky gamekeeper Angus, have finally snapped, furious at Archie’s treatment of his niece? Or was it one of the frustrated local competitors, desperate to end Archie’s winning streak?
Determined to crack the case and fuelled by more than one piece of her famous shortbread, Ally begins to narrow down her list of possible culprits, but is thrown for a loop when her chief suspect is found dead by the loch, a mysterious and threatening note clutched in their fingers. With a killer at large, can Ally finally uncover the truth? Or, as the sun sets over the highlands, will this game be her last?
This continues to be a great mystery series!
I absolutely love this series and every book in the series has been a gem!
Ally McKinley is a mature, insightful amateur sleuth and she gets along well with the local police. She’s nicely settled into life in Locharran & doesn’t go looking for trouble, but it always seems to find her (and her cute little guesthouse).
The local Highland Games competition is a fun setting and there are lots of new characters with all the competitors and their families. With all the new characters, there were lots of suspects to sift through and I found the different personalities really interesting. Ally does a solid job of investigating in her own way (seriously, someone get this lady a more secure Murder Board!) and the pace moved along nicely. I honestly couldn’t put the book down and had to find out who the murderer was.
While this is the 4th book in the series, it can definitely be read as a standalone.
You can buy your own copy of Murder at the Highland Games here.
About the Author, Dee MacDonald
Dee MacDonald grew up on an isolated farm in the Scottish Highlands. An only child, she’d often get fed up of reading and listening to a crackling radio, so her mother encouraged her to draw and to write ‘wee stories’, which she’d sew together into little books.
As an adult, her working life took her all over the globe as an air stewardess, into the world of TV, where she worked in Market Research and Sales, and then into hospitality, running B&Bs for over ten years.
After first finding her love of writing as a little girl, Dee became a published author of cosy crime and women’s fiction in her seventies. She lives by the sea in Cornwall with her husband, and has one son and two grandsons.
You can connect with Dee MacDonald online here:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | GOODREADS
