Kaitlyn Dunnett here, hawking my new Liss MacCrimmon mystery, The Scottie Barked at Midnight, which has been out in hardcover and ebook formats for a whole week and a half now. In some ways, it was a challenge to write this one.

Dilemma: how to add dogs to a series that already has two cats.

Solution: keep them (mostly) separated.

In The Scottie Barked at Midnight, on a cold and bleak March evening, Liss MacCrimmon is driving home from a shopping spree at the outlets in Freeport, Maine when something darts in front of her car. Afraid that she’s hit a dog or a cat, she stops to look for the animal. What she finds, mercifully uninjured, is a lost and shivering Scottish terrier. She takes the little dog, a female, to the nearest vet and then agrees to keep her until the owner is found.

She did not consult her two cats, Lumpkin and Glenora. Needless to say, neither is thrilled to have a house guest. Fortunately, the Scottie, Dandy by name, is soon claimed. Not so fortunately, Dandy was running loose because she was dognapped, and returning her to her owner leads to Liss’s involvement in yet another murder.

Lumpkin and Glenora were on the cover of an earlier adventure, Scotched. For The Scottie Barked at Midnight, it is Dandy in the cover illustration. In fact, there are two Scotties in the story, Dandy and Dondi, two-thirds of an act called “Deidre and her Dancing Doggies” that is primed to win the top prize on a television variety show . . . until someone does in Deidre.

In need of another dancer to fill in for the murdered woman, Deidre’s daughter taps Liss. She was once a professional Scottish dancer, after all. How hard can it be for her to learn the steps to accompany two trained pups? In fact, it isn’t hard at all. The hard part is figuring out who killed Deidre and who is behind the dirty tricks haunting the competition, before that unscrupulous person can knock Liss out of the running, too.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/ Kathy Lynn Emerson is the author of over fifty books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award in 2008 for best mystery nonfiction for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2014 in the best mystery short story category for “The Blessing Witch.” Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries (The Scottie Barked at Midnight) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries as Kathy (Murder in the Merchant’s Hall). The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” series and is set in Elizabethan England. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com