Review: Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses by Catriona McPherson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Dandy Gilver gets called by two old friends, Aurora and Pearl Lipscott, women she used to spend idyllic summers with as a child. Her friends' younger sister Fleur, who Dandy remembers as a spirited, imaginative, free spirit who loved to design outrageous costumes and write stories about pirates, is working as an English teacher in a girl's boarding school and has cut off all communications with her sisters and her mother. Can Dandy investigate?

Dandy and Alec toddle off to St Columba's school in Portpatrick, a bizarre mix-up with the headmistress leads to Dandy being mistaken for a replacement French teacher and taken up to the school where she finds Fleur is no longer the colourful vibrant girl she remembers, instead she has become a grey, mousy woman, almost unrecognisable.

St Columba's is unlike any school Dandy has ever known, the girls seem to have lots of freedom and the teachers are a bizarre hotchpotch of waifs and strays. Then one of the girls lets slip that the French teacher leaving mid-term is just the latest in a stream of teachers who have left suddenly to be with their families. Then Fleur claims that she has killed four people - does she mean the missing teachers?

While Dandy is desperately trying to remember French conjugations and fathom out what Fleur means, Alec has found a case of his own. The owner of the local fish and chip shop, an Italian called Joe (Guiseppe) Aldo, has hired Alec to look for his wife who has run off with another man. Joe's daughter is also a student at St Columba's and does not know her mother has left.

I found it a struggle to get into the last novel in this series, this was the opposite I was hooked from the get-go. Intrigued by the glimpses into a halcyon world when Dandy and the three Lipscott sisters would be petted and feted and adored by Mamma-dearest and batty Aunt Lilah in a house which was warm and luxurious and full of lovely things, so very different from Dandy's own austere childhood and subsequent life.

However, much as I enjoyed the reading of this book, I struggle finding satisfaction with the ending. There seemed to be too many plots and too many guilty parties, maybe because I was expecting a somewhat different explanation for what was happening at St Columba's I can't wrap my head around the true explanation? Anyway, I re-read the last two chapters this morning and whilst individually I can grasp the different plotlines, I can't pull them all together. Maybe it's that having so many mysteries wrapped up together seems too much of a coincidence? And yet when I think about excluding one mystery everything unravels because each relies on the other for a building block.

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