Legends & Last Rites: A Killrannoch Keep Cozy Mystery - Book 6
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Someone staged a murder to look like a five-hundred-year-old ritual. And it’s working.
When folklore researcher Fiona MacKay is found dead on the loch path — posed with eerie precision according to the ancient Highland rite of An Deireadh Dìleas — Killrannoch doesn’t just grieve. It panics. The legend says the rite has three stations. The sequence has already begun. And the fear spreading through the village’s informal network is precise, targeted, and spreading fast.
Moira Sinclair, Keeper of Killrannoch Keep, knows better than to trust a story without checking its sources. The legend is real. But the version terrifying the village was rewritten in 1887 by a land agent named Holloway — and the man running the same scheme today shares the name. Behind the staged murder, the corrupted ceremony, and the academic feeding the fear narrative is a planning application worth four million pounds and a community that has been deliberately frightened off the land he wants.
The truth is buried in a five-hundred-year-old founding document, a corrupted transcription, and the handwriting of a dead woman who left one last note for whoever came after her.
You are reading this correctly. Be careful who else does.
As the rite’s countdown moves toward its final station, Moira races to separate myth from motive — to restore the legend to its true meaning before the sequence completes and the land is lost. But this case demands more than evidence. It asks Moira to step out of the archive and speak the truth aloud, in public, for a community that has been deceived long enough.
Legends and Last Rites is the sixth and final novel in the Killrannoch Keep Cozy Mystery series — the one where the mystery runs deepest, the history reaches furthest back, and everything that has been building across six books finally lands. Featuring Highland folklore, historical intrigue, a slow-burn romance six books in the making, and a murder with roots in the 19th century, this is the series finale readers of atmospheric Scottish cozies have been waiting for.
The complete Killrannoch Keep series: Killrannoch Before the Storm (novella) · Highlands & Homicide · Tartans & Treachery · Kilts & Cold Cases · Bagpipes & Blackmail · Wills & Whispered Lies · Legends and Last Rites
Praise for this book
“"I've followed this series from the prequel novella and this might be the most confident entry yet. Brinegar trusts her readers to sit with quiet moments instead of rushing past them, and it pays off. The village of Killrannoch feels lived-in rather than sketched." ”