27 Apr 2025 - 11:15
Murderous Scottish Women: Lucy Ribchester, Natalie Jayne Clark & Mairi Kidd
Journey into the
murky depths of murderous Scottish novels with women at their heart.
Murder ballads are an oral practise traditionally sung by working class
women, and in Lucy Ribchester’s third novel, Murder Ballad, street ballad
singer Isobel finds herself caught in a risky tangle of murder and deceit,
despite rising through the ranks of 18th century Edinburgh society. Hear Lucy
speak about the novel accompanied by a live murder ballad performance from
Scottish folk singer Ailsa Dixon.
Natalie Jayne Clark, already an acclaimed performer in the Scottish poetry
scene, secured a publishing deal for her debut novel, The Malt Whisky
Murders, after pitching it at Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s crime writing
festival. This darkly funny tale of two women whose ambition to run the first
female-owned whisky distillery in Scotland on a remote peninsula is scuppered
when a grisly, decades-old secret is revealed, in the whisky barrels
themselves!
Helping us to navigate these grisly tales is author, Mairi Kidd, whose own
novel, The Specimens, retells the infamous story of Burke and Hare through
the eyes of two very different women.
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