Maggie Foster Books In Order

Publication Order of Loch Lonach Scottish Mysteries Books

Maggie Foster is the author of the award-winning Loch Lonach Scottish Mystery series. During a lull in her professional career, she was looking around for something to do and ended up in a writer’s group. Having been warned off writing as a profession by her mother (a published author many times over), she saw this as a lark and a way to make new friends. Both turned out to be true.

Maggie (name changed to protect the guilty) is the result of seven generations of Scottish ancestors settling in Texas, and an astounding number more who migrated from Scotland and Northern Ireland to various parts of America. They brought with them details of dress, cuisine, athletics, music, language, and more – much of which has made its way into the mysteries, salting the straight detection with a wee keek into the lives of the Scottish diaspora. Her background in genealogy, medicine, and law all contribute material to the narratives. She is a ruthless researcher and delights in plot twists and surprise endings. She is currently working on Book Seven and has ideas lined up for at least a dozen more tales.

The Loch Lonach Series:

The protagonist of the series is an amateur sleuth, an ICU nurse named Ginny Forbes. Ginny’s super power is that she can see implications others miss. She scratches her head and wonders why her fellow characters don’t do things that seem obvious to her. This allows her to peel away confusion and reveal the truth, though not usually immediately and rarely without help. Her side kick turns out to be the love of her life and, after some consideration of potential consequences, her husband.

1 – The Arms of Death

In the first book of the Loch Lonach Scottish Mystery Series one of Ginny’s patients, a man known to her through her genealogy connections, dies unexpectedly. There is a chance that what killed him will also kill her so she is motivated to do a bit of digging. After an engineered “accident” that lands her in the hospital, she retires from investigation, but is not allowed to give it up completely. It is Ginny who uncovers the truth and Ginny who helps the police solve the mystery.

2 – The Swick and the Dead

In the second installment of the series, Ginny finds a body. The dead woman is a colleague and a friend and it doesn’t look good for the staff of the Hillcrest Medical Center ICU. Cleared of suspicion by the police detective assigned to the case, Ginny goes on about her business, only to find that she now poses a threat to some person or organization unknown and who seems to have unlimited resources for tracking her down and attempting to eliminate her. It’s enough for the Laird of Loch Lonach to assign her a bodyguard. In the end she manages to escape sudden death, point the finger at the guilty party, and turn the clean-up of the streets of Loch Lonach over to the Feds.

3 – Viking Vengeance

The third installment is more action-adventure than mystery. Ginny is assigned to escort a miscreant from Texas to Canada and the mystery is whether she and the others will succeed or die in the attempt. It’s a tale of redemption and readers may find themselves rooting for the murderer before it’s over.

4 – Final Fling

In the tradition of straight detection, book four finds Ginny with a body and five red herrings, any of which could be guilty of the killing. Ginny must do some fancy footwork to make sure the true killer of the Highland Dance Judge is identified and the bodies all laid to rest in their respective graves before her wedding to the heir of Loch Lonach.

5 – Incarnadine

Book five starts only days after Ginny Forbes becomes Ginny Mackenzie. Among the wedding presents is the murder weapon from a very cold case. Somebody has decided that Ginny is the right person to unravel this mystery and there are reasons why Ginny cannot decline the honor. With help from the cast of “The Scottish Play” by William Shakespeare, she does her duty and retires from the stage with cracked ribs, but her reputation for catching killers intact.

6 – The Ghillie Knot

In book six an act of kindness on Ginny’s part comes back to haunt her. Detective Tran, the Dallas Police liaison to the clan, shows Ginny a photo of a dead woman and asks for help in finding four more missing women, all of whom look like Ginny. She agrees to act as bait for a trap the police have devised. The bait is taken, but the fish gets away, leaving Ginny with a stalker who does more than just make threatening phone calls. No one has to die to unravel this mystery, but human beings sometimes make very strange choices.