The Swick and the Dead is book two in Maggie Foster’s clever and imaginative Loch Lonach Mysteries series, and the odd word in the title, “swick,” has a double meaning. In recent slang, swick mashes together “sweet” and “sick” to refer to something “cool” or “excellent” or “pleasant.” In old Scottish, however, swik (and similar spellings) referred to something much darker: deceit or a deceiver.