Molly MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where she managed The Book Place, an independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.MacRae lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she connects children with books at the public library.
Her latest novel is Plaid and Plagiarism, book one in the Highland Bookshop Mystery series.
From MacRae's Q&A with Kings River Life Magazine:
KRL: What brought you to choose the setting and characters in your latest book/series? Please tell us a little about the setting and main character for your most recent book.Visit Molly MacRae's website.
Molly: Why did I choose a bookshop in the Scottish Highlands as the setting for Plaid and Plagiarism? For the same reason my main characters buy the shop and uproot their lives to move there and run it. It’s Scotland! The Highlands! A bookshop! Janet Marsh and her three business partners see the move as a great retirement/change of career scheme.
Janet, an American, is a retired librarian who loves everything about books. She and her family spent many summers in the Inversgail, Scotland, the town where the bookshop is located. Janet is joined in the scheme by her daughter (a burned-out lawyer), her daughter’s old college friend (a newspaperwoman who needs to reinvent herself in an age when print newspapers are disappearing) and Janet’s longtime friend Christine, a Scot who lived in the States for thirty years and plans to move home to Inversgail for the business and to care for her aging parents.
The setup is a little farfetched, but I researched the UK laws on Americans buying businesses and moving over there; I once managed a bookstore; and I lived in Scotland. So yeah, I think it could be done. Well, okay, probably only...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Plaid and Plagiarism.
The Page 69 Test: Plaid and Plagiarism.
Writers Read: Molly MacRae.
--Marshal Zeringue