Tangled Web UK Review January 2009
The Winter Ground by
Catriona McPherson
hbk out October 08
Published by Hodder
at £19.99
This is the fourth in the Dandy Gilver series about an amateur sleuth in the mid nineteen-twenties, Mrs Gilver being the wife of a rich but surly land-owner in Perthshire. A woman of independent spirit, she passes her time colluding with her cousin Alec, another well-heeled toff, in investigating local killings.
In this one, a neighbour Albert Wilson, a mere plebian Glasgow brickmaker with a fortune and a castle, allows a failing circus to winter on his land and the strange collection of folk who man it give rise to another mystery for Dandy. After repeated life-threatening sabotage of their equipment, their prime attraction, a pony-acrobat named Anastasia, comes off her mount in suspicious curcumstances and fractures her skull. The clash of personalities amongst the clowns and acrobats conflicts nicely with their collective desire to stick together as circus-folk against the ‘flatties’, one of the weird expressions that permeated the people of the Big Top. The explanation for the murder can be spotted well before the end, though there is a final twist in the tail.
Catriona McPherson is an accomplished writer, having been short-listed for a couple of literary awards in recent years. She writes fluently and with wit and perception, the characters jumping fully alive from the page. In this one, I have to admit that I was not all that gripped by the plot for the first half of the book, probably because I have no liking for circuses and the locale put me off a little. However, the quality of the writing kept me going until the pace hotted up and I felt by the end that I had had a satisfying read.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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