Review: After the Armistice Ball

After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read an ARC of the latest Dandy Gilver book I was interested enough to go back to the very beginning and see where it all began.

The year is 1922, Dandy Gilver is invited to her friend Daisy's annual Armistice Ball, an event which has become increasingly tense as Daisy and her husband Silas Esslemont seem oblivious to the penury of their guests and blithely raise funds for charity, pondering whether to decline this year Dandy is called by Daisy herself with a garbled request for assistance. There has been some unpleasantness involving Mrs Lena Duffy and her fabulous diamonds, she claims that the diamonds were stolen when she stayed the night at the Esslemont's house (albeit not discovered until much later) and is demanding that Silas' insurance company pays up, despite a little irregularity with the premiums. Daisy wants Dandy to find out what really happened to the diamonds, before Mrs Duffy follows through on her threat to disclose some unnamed secret to the world.

At first Dandy doesn't know who to believe, is Silas being unreasonable and a bit common in hiding behind the rules of the insurance company, one which he owns? Or is Mrs Duffy asking him to commit fraud? How were the diamonds taken out of the safe several times since the stay at the Esslemont's without anyone realising that they were fake? Why did Mrs Duffy's younger daughter Cara take the diamonds to a strange jeweller to be valued rather than to the family jeweller?

I won't divulge anything further, suffice it to say that the theft leads to a murder in which Dandy becomes embroiled. I enjoyed watching her theorise one way and then another, I absolutely hate it when the detective just delivers the culprit as a fait accompli - at school we were always told to show our workings LOL. I did guess the murderer and the motive, sort of, but I really enjoyed the way the threads were unravelled and that Catriona McPherson didn't actually spell out the truth at all - it was all left to the reader to deduce.

If you are a fan of historical detective stories featuring the upper classes, if not actually the aristocracy, such as Ashley Weaver's Amory Ames, or Allison Montclair's Sparks and Bainbridge, or Anna Lee Huber's Verity Kent series then I think you will love these as well.

Off to book 2.

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