SCOT’S EGGS by Catriona McPherson

I first featured Catriona McPherson about a decade ago, when I first heard about her on Janet Reid’s blog. Janet said that Catriona’s books were to be read with “a notebook in hand” and that sounded like a must-read author to me. Basically, I’ve been a Catriona McPherson fan ever since.

I recently saw Catriona at a conference, and we got to catch up. After I heard the premise for SCOT’S EGGS (12.02.25), I knew it would be the perfect mystery to cozy up with by a fire during the holidays. Have a look:

Not even Cuento’s Easter bonnet parade can distract Lexy Campbell from conception woes and missing tourists Bill and Billie Miller. The Millers’ vintage Mustang has been abandoned, its interior covered in blood.

Is this a double murder, and if so, where are the bodies? Why were the Millers spending the night in their car? Did they pitch up at the Last Ditch Motel only to be turned away? Are they really dead? The Trinity for Trouble are quickly on the case!

As they start to identify the guests staying at the motel the weekend before Easter – including a Goth and a barbershop singer on stilts – disturbing evidence comes to light. Can Lexy see though all the deception to unmask the truth and save the Last Ditch?

Kirkus said: “a loopy, lovable Northern California crew … a baffling double murder … a brisk, clever whodunit”

In our last interview (from ten years ago! https://www.karenbmccoy.com/the-child-garden-by-catriona-mcpherson/), you said, “I think I enjoy the good days of the first draft best. Second best is when I finally see what’s wrong in a late draft and correct something that’s been a pebble in my shoe for months.” In what ways, if any, is this still true for you, and how has your writing process changed since then?

Well, hello, past me! I think it holds, Karen. Because – here comes Grandma –  ten years ago I had already been writing full-time for fifteen years. I really do still wait for and welcome that moment in the first draft when I stop saying “Oh, I’ve done it this time. There’s no book here. These aren’t characters. I need to pay back the advance.” and instead suddenly feel a lightness, like thermals lifting me, and know that the story is off and running and all I need to do now is follow along and type fast.

And oh my God, yes! When a copy-editor fixes a lumpy sentence that I couldn’t smooth out? Heaven.

Lovely! SCOT’S EGGS is the eighth title in your Last Ditch mystery series. Without giving away spoilers, what would you tell readers who might be new to this series?

You might wonder why Lexy Campbell, from Scotland, is living in a houseboat behind a motel in a college town in northern California. Well, in book one – SCOT FREE – she has a whirlwind romance with a dentist on a golfing trip to Scotland, and follows him home to marry him. The marriage lasts six months and, after the divorce, she is waiting with her ticket home bought and her bags packed to see her one remaining client (she’s a marriage and family therapist) when the police bang on the door and tell her that the client is in jail for murdering her (the client’s, this is) husband. Lexy checks in to the Last Ditch Motel, because it’s all she can afford. By the end of the book she has gathered a found family of misfits from among the motel’s permanent residents. And inherited a houseboat. That should do it.

Indeed. In what ways, if any, did your former library work experience inform your writing before (or after) you became a full-time author?

Not so much for the Last Ditch series, but it helped no end for my historicals. I worked for two years in the local history department of Edinburgh City Libraries, and so when I started to write about Scotland in the 1920s I knew what they had in the stacks that could weave authenticity through my stories and embroider every setting with rich detail. My former colleagues used to dive for the coffee-room when they saw me coming. They really wanted to tell me to go down into the dusty dungeons and get the . . . bound newspapers, theatre bills, daguerrotypes etc for myself.

I would have been right down there with you! What do you think is the most challenging aspect of being an author in this day and age?

Well, I still love it. My worst day as a writer is better than my best day as a linguistics professor. And none of the challenges are about craft or community. They’re all about the business side,  particularly the shadier end. I’m surprised sometimes how much acceptance there is of theft – whether by Gen AI companies training their LLMs on stolen work or readers not wondering why they can download 500 free books from this website they’ve never heard of but the formatting’s a bit weird. The defences of book theft are hilarious. “Content wants to be free,” I’ve heard. My answer is “Make some content and give it away then.” Also, “Someone might get really hooked on your work and buy the rest of it.” If a . . . baker said that, my answer would be, “Gimme a cake. I might like it.” Sheesh.

But, as I say, I still wake up every morning happy that I’m a writer and in every one of my daydreams I’m always a writer. I write on location with my husband, Keanu Reeves, or I write despite being a professional aerial adagio performer in a travelling circus . . . In every possible world in the multiverse, I write.

Order SCOT’S EGGS

For the rest of the Last Ditch mystery series and to find out more about
Catriona’s additional books, go to http://catrionamcpherson.com/

Serial awards-botherer, Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories about a toff; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories about an oik; and contemporary psychothriller standalones. These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of-water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California. Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.