Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder [by] Catriona McPherson
New York; Minotaur [2012]
978-1-250-00737-7 ; $24.99
The time is the early 1920's, the setting is Dumferline, Scotland, and upper-class sleuth Dandelion Gilver has received a summons to the home of the owners of one of the two department stores in town. The youngest young lady of the family has gone missing. There is great fear that she is either a) eloping with the youngest male of the other department store family or b) running away from this match. When Dandy arrives at the house, everything is in a tizzy, for it is the 50th anniversary of the store, and so much is going wrong. Dandy gets swept up in the festivities and is taken to the store for the celebration. The celebration's questionable highpoint, however, is the appearance of the missing young woman, who is now dead, seemingly shot by her own mother.
The mother is discredited as the murderer, and, for a brief time, Dandy is no. 1 suspect. At the funeral, held where it happened in the department store, is marked by the death of the young man from the other family, who seems to leap to his doom on the top of the elevator in the store.
Dandy and her crime-solving partner Alec are plunged into a very confusing disarray of families, with lies, rumors, affairs and presumed affairs and other secrets abounding. They discover tings, leading to other things, and then they find their finds have feet of clay. What begins as a Montague-Capulet feud, ends up a series of crumbling relationships and lies. And as these well-to-do merchant familes struggle with each other, the world that they knew, the pre-World War I world, crumbles around them. An interesting view of the old giving way to the new, in more than one way.
Dandy Gilver is a plucky young woman in the mold of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs and Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple. I found her refreshing and funny: witty, clever, and engaging. Highly recommended. ~lss-r
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Library book.
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