Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses--A Mystery

August 12, 2013
The professional becomes personal in Agatha-winner McPherson’s slow-moving seventh 1920s mystery featuring Edinburgh PI Dandy Gilver (after 2012’s Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder). Now one half of the detective agency Gilver and Osborne, Dandy is horrified to learn that girlhood friend Fleur Lipscott, the youngest of three sisters of a family Dandy has always admired, might be in deep trouble. Older sisters Pearl and Aurora fear that Fleur is about to bolt from St. Columba’s, the Wigtownshire school where she teaches. Dandy travels to St. Columba’s, where her being mistaken for a new teacher allows her to infiltrate the school. Dandy soon realizes that instructors are quitting, being fired, or disappearing at an alarming rate. The discovery of an unidentified woman’s body raises the stakes. Dandy’s droll conversations with her charmingly stuffy husband provide some needed levity in this overly convoluted cozy. Lisa Moylett, Coombs Moylett Literary Agency.

November 1, 2013
Dead bodies and mysterious disappearances provide a difficult case for a pair of well-born sleuths. Aristocratic Dandy Gilver and her partner Alec Osborne's abilities to range outside their elite circle in 1920s Britain are acilitated by Dandy's skill in masquerade. When her childhood friends Pearl and Aurora Lipscott ask her to find out how their sister Fleur is doing teaching at a girls school in coastal Scotland, Dandy, mistaken for a schoolmistress, goes undercover at St. Columba's while Alec stays at the local inn. Dandy can't imagine that wealthy, flighty, imaginative Fleur could possibly be teaching at a remote school. When a body washes up on the shore, Dandy goes with Fleur to see if it's Miss Beauclerc, the missing French mistress. It isn't, but before Fleur vanishes from St. Columba's, she seems to admit that she murdered five people. Dandy and Alec are forced to dig into Fleur's past even after they're fired by Fleur's family, who know more than they're willing to share. Dandy, certain that there's something fishy about the school, is asked to leave soon after finding both Fleur's and the missing Miss Beauclerc's luggage. A trail that leads to Fleur's house in Scotland lands the sleuthing duo in extreme danger. The latest of McPherson's delightful pastiches of golden-age British mysteries (Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder, 2012, etc.) offers loads of red herrings to keep readers guessing.

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November 1, 2013

No one might have noticed that schoolteachers were going missing, if one of them hadn't been Dandy's old chum Fleur. The seventh case for the witty amateur detective (after the Agatha Award-winning Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder) who beguiles as she sleuths across 1920s Scotland.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2013
Upper-class Scottish sleuth Dandy Gilver recalls a perfect summer in her teens spent in the bosom of the Lipscott familythe widowed mother and her golden daughters, Aurora, Pearl, and Fleurwhen decades later a worried Pearl asks Dandy to see what has gone wrong with Fleur, the adored youngest. Fleur, an imaginative child who became a wild teenager, is now a fearful English teacher at a girls' school who tells Dandy she's killed four people. When a woman's body washes up on a nearby beach, Fleur proclaims this number five, then disappears. As Alec Osborne, Dandy's detective colleague, looks into the recent departures of several of the school's instructors, Dandy investigates from her new position on the school staff, and together they try to account for Fleur's four previous corpses. Dandy's reminiscences of the Lipscotts cast a lovely patina on the seventh in this fine series, which moves between lighthearted and deadly serious, with intuitive, no-nonsense Dandy dealing with flighty girls and despairing adults with equal aplomb and showing increasing assurance in her professional and personal life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)