'This series is a must-read for anyone who loves the sea, or islands, or joyous, intricate story-telling.' ANN CLEEVES

It's the dark nights in the run up to Christmas, and sailing sleuth Cass Lynch's first night on dry land is disturbed by strange noises outside her isolated cottage. Tiny footprints in the moonlit snow trail from her front door before mysteriously disappearing. Soon Cass learns others were visited by the same tiny feet in the night.

It looks like ingenious local teenagers playing tricks - but what happens when festive games turn deadly?

Cass soon finds out as a schoolboy disappears, leaving only a trail of footprints into the middle of a snowy field. She's determined to investigate, but uncovering the truth will also put her in danger . . .

Nail-biting and unputdownable, A Shetland Winter Mystery is the latest instalment in the much-loved Shetland Sailing Mystery series by Marsali Taylor. Perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves, Elly Griffiths and J M Dalgliesh.

Readers LOVE the Shetland Sailing Mysteries:

'Definitely the best of the Cass Lynch series yet!' 5* Reader Review

'The beautiful descriptions of Shetland life, traditions, it's landscape and even language bring everything to life.' 5* Reader Review

'This series gets better and better' 5* Reader Review

'A beautifully written story, with descriptions so vivid you can smell the sea and beautiful countryside.' 5* Reader Review

'The perfect lockdown read for anyone who longs to be back on the sea.' 5* Reader Review

Marsali grew up near Edinburgh, Scotland.  Her summer family holidays were spent in a remote cottage in the West Highlands, the region where her detective Gavin Macrae lives.  Like her sailing heroine, Cass, she has always been used to boats, and used her ‘gap year’ earnings to buy her first sailing dinghy, Lady Blue.  She studied English at Dundee University, did a year of teacher training and took up her first post, teaching English and French to secondary children in Aith, Shetland.  Gradually her role expanded to doing drama too, and both primary and secondary pupils have won prizes performing her plays at the local Drama Festival.  Some of these plays were in Shetlandic, the local dialect.





Marsali teaches dinghy sailing at her local club, and is a keen single-handed sailor in her Offshore 8 m yacht, Karima S – the double of Cass’s Khalida.  


A qualified STGA green badge tourist guide for Shetland, she now spends a good deal of her summer sharing her home with visitors from overseas.  She is particularly interested in women’s history, and has published Women’s Suffrage in Shetland, two years’ worth of original research.  She followed this with The Story of Busta House, the romantic tale of the house which is the setting for part of Death on a Longship.


Marsali also writes for the monthly magazine Shetland Life – a mixture of travel writing, interviews, investigative journalism and historical research.