A big YES from me. Have always found Traude’s books an enjoyable read and this was no different. If you haven’t read any of his titles, search them out now. Highly recommend.

Fickle Fortunes is the sixth book in this Scottish mystery series. This is a well written police procedural with interesting well drawn characters, lots of suspects, multiple red herrings, and a little romantic tension between DI McCord and journalist Amy Thornton. DI McCord and his team investigate the fatal fall of a local woman. Was it an accident or was she pushed? I enjoyed this book and was surprised by who the killer turned out to be. I look forward to reading the next book in this charming series.

Traude Ailinger is an author completely new to me but now that I have found out how good she is I will be looking for her other books.
I personally think this is more of a police procedural than a 'cozy' (as others have described it) but it certainly benefits from the presence of Amy Thornton, the reporter from the Forth Write Magazine.
There's a gritty realism to a plot that includes secrets and lies, jealousy, arson and murder.
Edinburgh is a setting often favoured by crime writers and Detective Inspector Russell McCord is a typically gruff no-nonsense detective who has a softer side his colleagues rarely glimpse. Audrey Hepburn is a welcome guest character who manages to ruffle everyone's feathers.
A great read for all crime fiction aficionados.

This book was fine. I read it while traveling to and in Edinburgh to kind of get the local flavor, and I did enjoy that bit of it, though some parts of it did feel like it could have been set anywhere. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.

I did not realize initially that this book was part of a series, but it doesn’t seem that you must have read the previous works in order to follow and enjoy this one.

I think my main issue was with the underlying love story between the two protagonists - it’s meant to be a slow burn, everyone around them can see they’re in love with each other, but each of them refuses to admit it, and they are stubborn and fight a lot. Generally I like this kind of arc, but this is book 6 of the story - that is a reeeeeally slow slow burn. At a certain point, I feel like some of the miscommunications would have to be resolved or they would have to tell each other to go away for real. I also didn’t really love either of them, nor could I really figure out how old they were supposed to be - one is a grumpy Scottish police guy and the other is like, a hotshot journalist.

Normally I think I would be into this concept but it was really drawn out for the series aspect of it, and I think I would have liked more descriptions of how they look/some actual positive chemistry between McCord and Amy.

The mystery itself was okay. I saw some of the twists coming, but not all of them.

Often in a book like this, the writing can be really cheesy and I actually thought this one was pretty well-written.

This was a very interesting read and I highly enjoyed it. I think other readers will also. Put it on your tbr list!