Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses: A Mystery - Hardcover

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