Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses - Hardcover

Catriona McPherson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1444731858 ISBN 13: 9781444731859

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012

Synopsis

Before she was a detective, before she was a reluctant wife and distracted mother, before she was even a debutante, Dandy Gilver spent one perfect summer with the Lipscotts of Pereford. The golden memories of it have sustained her through many a cold snap in Perthshire. So when two of the Lipscott sisters beg her to help the third, she can hardly refuse. Sweet, pretty Fleur Lipscott: where is she now? The astonishing answer to this is that Fleur - still Miss Lipscott, indeed more Miss Lipscott than ever - is buried alive in the tiny seaside village of Portpatrick, working as a schoolmistress at St Columba's College for Young Ladies. But she is one of the few remaining, for St Columba's has been shedding mistresses as a snake its skins and the exodus is far from over. With mistresses vanishing and corpses mounting up, can Mrs Gilver, detective, pass herself off as Miss Gilver, English mistress, to solve the one and stop the other?

About this title

About the Author:

CATRIONA MCPHERSON was born near Edinburgh, where she received her Ph.D. Her previous Dandy Gilver mystery, Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains, won the Sue Feder Memorial Award in 2012. Catriona lives in Davis, California, with her husband and two cats.

From Booklist:

Upper-class Scottish sleuth Dandy Gilver recalls a perfect summer in her teens spent in the bosom of the Lipscott family—the widowed mother and her golden daughters, Aurora, Pearl, and Fleur—when 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. --Michele Leber

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1444731858
• ISBN 13: 9781444731859
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336