Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPhersonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ha, so much for my prediction - 100% wrong! And yet irritatingly I did have a slight feeling about the real culprit.
Our amateur sleuth Dandy Gilver receives a letter from an Edinburgh lady, accusing her husband of trying to kill her, she begs Dandy to come and work undercover as her maid in order to help her escape. In disguise as Miss Rossiter, ladies maid, Dandy finds her employer Lollie Balfour (real first name Walburga!) to be a sacred waif of a woman, but surprisingly her husband Phillip doesn't appear to be the sort of monster who threatens to kill his wife. Yet talking to the other servants Dandy finds that each of them has a tale of the spiteful, cruel things that Mr Balfour has done to them. Unsurprising then that he is found dead, stabbed in the neck with one of the kitchen knives.
This is a classic golden age locked door mystery. Because the butler meticulously locks all the door every night the murder must be an 'inside job', certainly nearly everyone has a motive, but it seems that everyone also has an alibi!
As always this was a cracking read, I was totally convinced the murderer was someone completely different and yet the clues were all there ready to be unpicked, just little nuggets dropped carelessly into conversations.
Overall, very satisfactory mystery with a plausible ending that I did not see coming.
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