Summer Solstice

Scottish local key businessman Sam Howard's interests include the hotel recently installed in Countess Lucinda Rhives's Scottish coastal family castle and confided the management to his lover, Carrie Marchmont. The latter supports the annual amateur Shakespeare performance being mounted by her theatrical friend Elfrida Phibbs and her lover, church cantor and organist Oscar Blundell, who mentors keyboard-gifted rascal Brody but still wrestles with his daughter's tragic death. Sam also owns the local paper "Langmore and Highland Gazette", which may ruin him as it risks a huge damage claim for publishing an unsubstantiated article ascribing plagiarism to US bestseller-author Alexia White, whom he may persuade to consider alternatives. Carrie is pregnant, yet protests as Sam engages an external hotel manager, consultant Leo Berger, who pleads seeking proper profits by aiming at a richer clientele, even canceling the merely regional theater festival. Charming Italian hotel guest Lorenzo Calpeni gets on exceptionally well with countess Lucinda, who hates her bumbling title heir cousin and mistrusts the intentions of Australian Scott Allen, who gets engaged as reporter by Sam but has a special interest in the Rhives castle and family history. —KGF Vissers