There are two types of crime fiction that commonly cop all the literary attention: hardboiled and psychological. Hardboiled fiction is terse and sulphurous, and features the kind of pulpy plots and characters that screenwriters swoon over. The psychological variety gets inside the fervid brains of your innocent-looking next door neighbors. But there is a third, hugely popular genre, which is almost always damned by faint praise: the comfy whodunit. These books – usually a series – present a wry, lovable sleuth who brings delightfully arcane specialist skills to the scene of the crime. Thus mystery shelves are packed with crime-busting medieval monks, gardeners, psychics, and antiquarian book dealers.

The Celtic Riddle is a comfy whodunit, the fourth in a successful series of archeological mysteries, with Toronto-based antiques dealer Lara McClintoch as its feisty, 40-ish heroine. Like its predecessors, The Celtic Riddle sets out to demonstrate that ancient history is very much alive, and apt to throw mythological monkey wrenches into the present.

The setting is County Kerry, Ireland, where McClintoch attends the reading of a will. A disgruntled industrialist leaves his squabbling family penniless, and instead rewards them with fragments of a Celtic poem. It turns out that the enigmatic phrases are clues to a priceless treasure, and pretty soon a body is found at the foot of a cliff. McClintoch must not only decipher the clues but set off in indefatigable pursuit of a commitment-shy RCMP officer, a spendthrift ex-husband, and a wayward adolescent.

McClintoch makes a no-nonsense, likeable heroine, and the reader can forgive the author’s occasional lapses into travel-brochure Irish cliché (inevitably, McClintoch visits a pub where the colourful locals play a spontaneous jig and reel). There are some minor character inconsistencies, but the action moves along smartly, and armchair enthusiasts of archeology and legend will find the mystic bits lip-smackingly spooky.