A Dream of Death

On a remote Scottish island, American antique dealer Kate Hamilton sleuths a killing that eerily replicates a murder still unsolved after 200 years.

Autumn has come and gone on Scotland's Isle of Rothsay, and the locals gather for the Tartan Ball, the annual end-of-tourist-season gala. Among the invited guests is American antique dealer Kate Hamilton. Returning to the island where her husband died is brutal, but Kate is determined to repair her relationship with her sister-in-law, Elenor Spurgeon, the proprietor of Rothsay's deluxe country house hotel.

Kate has hardly unpacked when a body turns up, murdered in an eerie recreation of an infamous unsolved murder two hundred years before. And the only clue to the killer's identity lies in a curiously embellished antique casket. When Bo Duff, the gentle handyman who had tried to save Kate's husband's life, is taken into custody, she teams up with vacationing Detective Inspector Tom Mallory to clear Bo's name. To accomplish that, they'll have to unmask a killer who seems bizarrely fixated on the past…because two hundred years is an awfully long time to hold a grudge in A Dream of Death, the tantalizing series debut by Connie Berry.

Connie Berry was born in Racine, Wisconsin, to second generation immigrants from Scandinavia and the British Isles. Like her main character, Connie grew up in the world of fine antiques. Her parents, unrepentant antique fanatics, eventually opened a shop, not because they liked selling antiques so much but because they needed a plausible excuse to continue buying them. Connie has degrees in English from DePauw University and The Ohio State University. She also studied at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany and St. Clare's College in Oxford, England. A self-confessed Anglophile, Connie's Antique mysteries are set in the UK. She lives in Ohio with her husband, Bob, and adorable Shih Tzu, Millie. They have two sons. Besides writing, Connie loves foreign travel, antiques, reading, knitting, and cute animals.