In a clear nod to Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express", author Stuart MacBride sets his tale in Skirivour Castle Hotel in the Highlands, amasses a bunch of suspects and dreadful people. Detective Sergeant Roberta Steel decides to surprise her wife Susan, who is attending a wedding there.

Roberta is horrified to find that everyone attending the wedding, other than Susan, is a conservative politician, or related to one. And she's horrified and disgusted, and Susan is unhappy with Roberta, who goes off by herself to get well and properly drunk.

The next morning, shortly before a huge thunderstorm knocks out the power and phone lines, she and others discover the dead body of the father of the bride, impaled on a huge stag head in the hotel lobby.

As the senior police officer present, Roberta, hugely hungover, leads an investigation with the local police sergeant Sandy Moore, whose son is marrying the bride, and young PC McKinnon. They begin the hard job of investigating the guests and hotel staff, who are unhappy to be stuck in their rooms during Roberta's investigation. Every guest claims the dead man was wonderful, and soon it becomes obvious that they all have the same thing to say about him, never mind the real stories about the man paint a different picture.

Roberta leads the other two, and though the leads point to a lot of collusion and guilt, there is no resounding wrap-up, or arrests made, making this mystery a little dissatisfying, even seeing how MacBride used aspects of Christie's mystery.

Roberta is something else; foul-mouthed and unwilling to kowtow to anyone. I found her humour funny at first, but the repetition of certain jokes and points, rendered in constant profanity, did cause my interest to wane somewhat over the course of the story.

I don't know if this is how Roberta's other investigations went, but I'm sort of curious about some of MacBride's other novels, which I might check out.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Pan Macmillan for this ARC in exchange for my review.