Witty Little Knitter

DNF at 50% might try to pick it up another time.

This is partly my fault because I didn't read the description properly before buying this book. I had expected a proper true-crime book that takes a handful of cases and covers them quite in-depth but this books takes certain types of crime (smuggling, murder, robbery etc.), sometimes with a short introduction (if it's about something like whisky-smuggling and rioting which was connected with the exact circumstances of life in the Highlands) and then gives samples of a lot of crimes. Sometimes the stories are not much more than anecdotes, only one or two pages long.
I would have been fine with that even if it wasn't what I expected but I missed more background-information on everything. As said some of the chapters have a short introduction about what drove the people to this but most of the time I felt like I was missing the bigger picture. Was this a common crime around this time or something that only happened rarely? One chapter talks about somebody being fined 1 Pound for a crime and then somebody being fined 50 Pound for a very similar crime. The author acknowledges that the latter was a lot but there is no try to explain this huge difference between both, if that was a common occurence and so on.
As it is this book is just a collection of facts without any effort to interpret them or give the reader any information about what they mean.