ARC Review – The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle

From Goodreads:

Ropa Moyo is no stranger to magic or mysteries. But she’s still stuck in an irksomely unpaid internship. So she’s thrilled to attend a magical convention at Dunvegan Castle, on the Isle of Skye, where she’ll rub elbows with eminent magicians.

For Ropa, it’s the perfect opportunity to finally prove her worth. Then a librarian is murdered and a precious scroll stolen. Suddenly, every magician is a suspect, and Ropa and her allies investigate. Trapped in a castle, with suspicions mounting, Ropa must contend with corruption, skulduggery and power plays. Time to ask for a raise?

My Reivews of Book 1 and Book 2

Ropa is back! But this time she is not chatting with the dead of edinburgh but instead she has found herself at a magical conference on the Isle of Skye. I adore this change in scenery. Up off the north-west coast the scenery of Skye is so much different from Edinburgh with its own myths, legends, ghost stories and even links to the world of the fae and Huchu gives us a little taste of it all in this book.

The plot is a subtly crafted locked room mystery. The academic conference bringing together magic pracitioners, students, magical lawyers, makers of magical objects all in one place and due to a marder and a theft they are all trapped under one roof, till ropa can find the culprit. This makes for so many interesting little tid bits of infromation about not only magical scotland but the world as a whole. We learn about Scottish magic and the in-fights between the four schools, clan wars of the highlands and the differece in lowlanders magic. A deligation from ethiopia gives us insight into religious based magical practice and the unexpected arrival of a prominant English practitioner stirs up trouble. All of the detail is so much fun. However, we are still only teased about what the cataclism is/was. We get some more subtle details, how it affected the islands and its people, the country side, politics etc., but we still have no clear sign at to what actually happened.

I feel like Ropa herself, just wanting to devour all the new information we are given. Then on top of all the magical politics, we have all the ghost stories, old curses, rumours of a mysterious fifth school, the fae, fun and games in the form of magical ‘rugby’ and full on magical battles. It never seems to stop and I love it.

Even though the cast of characters is huge I felt we got to know a lot more about characters from previous books, especially Ropa’s mentor/boss Sir Callander, we got to see all the sides of him in this. His trust of Ropa, his power and prowess in magic, even some of his home life. It really made me begin to like him as a character, dropping a bit of the stern facade he had in the other books. There is still the usual gang though, Pria is as always one of my favourite characters and she is just as sassy and kick ass as she was in he prvious books.

I am left with so many exciting questions that I hope are going to be answered in book 4. But the one that keeps coming back to me other than all those pretaining to the cataclism is what on earth are the rules to “rugby”