Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Golden Oldies - reviewing previously unreviewed books by previously reviewed “greatest hits” authors!
As we approach nearly twenty-five years of the MVAC reviews of archaeological fiction, I thought it would be fun to re-visit six of the authors whose works have been reviewed in the past. Three of these authors have sadly passed away since I first reviewed them (Margot Arnold, Lynn Hamilton, and Elizabeth Peters); two have “retired” their archaeologist protagonists, Gideon Oliver (Aaron Elkins), and Emma Fielding (Dana Cameron); and one, (Kate Ellis) continues to put DI Wesley Peterson and his friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, in harm’s way as solve contemporary crimes that have their roots in the distant past. While these authors have been reviewed previously, these books have not.
Lament for a Lady Laird (Golden Oldie) by Margot Arnold
Reviewed on: August 1, 2025
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York
1990 (PB)
Between 1979 and 1995, the late Margot Arnold (born, Petronelle Marguerite Mary Crouch!) wrote twelve splendid mysteries that featured American-born cultural anthropologist Penny Spring and her irascible friend and partner-in-crime-solving colleague, British-born archaeologist Sir Toby Glendower. Together the two of them took on mysteries with an anthropological and/or archaeological tinge that spanned the globe from the continental United States to Israel to Hawaii to Italy and beyond. The mid-point in their adventures took them to the Craignish Peninsula on the western coast of Scotland in Lament for a Lady Laird and seemed like an appropriate return to this wonderful series (two other titles were considered in 2002) as we close in on twenty-five years of reviews.
While Sir Toby was off to Bordeaux to replenish his vaunted wine cellar during the summer interim at Oxford University, Penny had received a rather frantic letter from her former Radcliffe roommate, Heather Macdonell. Family tragedies had forced Heather to give up her academic pursuits early, but she had persevered and had gone on to become a fabulously successful businesswoman in New York City. While not maintaining a close friendship over the years, the two had continued to correspond, and now Heather fairly pleaded with Penny to spend at least a few weeks with her at her newly inherited property in the western Scottish Highlands.
With some reluctance, Penny agrees to visit the secluded Soruba House, which Heather had recently inherited under the rather complex inheritance laws of Scotland. Heather early on explains to Penny that while inheriting the house and the three hundred or so acres that included a number of working farms seemed like a dream come true, the situation had turned into a waking nightmare, with creaking doors and floorboards and phantom bagpipe laments heard in the dead of the night. Heather is convinced that it is the manifestation of the curse of the Macdonell at play—a curse visited upon the eldest off-spring of the Macdonell clan, killing off the first-born going back generations. Penny has a far-different interpretation of events, however. The ghostly manifestations did not begin until several weeks after Heather had moved into Soruba House, and after she had announced at a dinner party given by her new neighbor, Amy McClintock—also a lady laird-- that she intended to live at Soruba House permanently rather than being a summer resident only, as all her neighbors apparently surmised. From Penny’s perspective each of the dinner party guests, especially neighboring kinsman, Ian Macdonell, who had assumed he would inherit the family property, had a vested interest in driving Heather back to safer and more familiar surroundings in New York City. The situation takes a dramatic turn when it is the body of Amy McClintock, not Heather, that is found washed up on the beach near Soruba House. Investigators quickly establish that Amy was not the victim of a boating accident, as originally thought, but rather the victim of a cold-blooded murderer.
Notwithstanding Amy McClintock’s murder, Heather continues to be subject to alarming phenomena, which prompts Penny to put in a call to Toby for assistance. Fortunately, there is a long barrow—a possible burial mound dating back to the age of Viking exploration or even earlier—on Heather’s property, which gives Toby a plausible cover story for his visit. Together the two intrepid sleuths are able to piece together the puzzle that surrounds Soruba House and its environs, but not before Penny, Heather, and Heather’s visiting niece Allison, nearly meet a deadly fate in the Corrievrecken, the second largest whirlpool in Europe after the famed Maelstrom. And the near disaster was not an accident!
While Lament for a Lady Laird is a bit light on archaeology—Toby does a rapid survey of the barrow and turns in a report to the Scottish Department of Antiquities, where he surmises “it will molder until Kingdom come, judging by the present state of things.”—any Penny and Toby adventure is worth a few hours of delightful reading. Four trowels for this visit with “old friends.”
