Dandy Gilver and The Reek of Red Herrings by Catriona McPhersonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars, I'm knocking off half a star for all the Doric talk.
In what I feel is the grisliest investigation to date, Dandy Gilver and Alec Osborne travel at Christmas to a small fishing village in Banffshire called Gamrie. Engaged by Mr Birchfield, a herring distributor, to investigate why/how a dismembered body has been stored in barrels of herrings and to locate the two missing barrels before a customer makes a gruesome discovery. The stamping of the barrels in the harbour and the design of the barrels is sufficient to narrow down the precise batch of herrings. So off to Gamrie go our sleuths, to a small town of superstitions and customs far removed from 'modern day' Perthshire and Dandy's estate.
Dandy and Alec are plunged into what could be their oddest location to date. A parsimonious landlady, a bible-quoting vicar, a poetry-quoting doctor, a village in which all the fishing families appear to have intermarried and have a bewildering number of names, and a pair of brothers with a taxidermy museum at the top of the hill. Added to which, when they start asking questions about missing people, it turns out that there are a whole raft of peculiar strangers who have been seen once but never again.
I guessed one mystery quite early on (in fact I wish I had made a note in my Kindle when I had the thought), but the other mystery kept me guessing right to the end, in fact I suspected Dandy had got it wrong!
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment