Bury Her Deep

I really like this author. She clearly respects her readers. I love that she drops a subtle word here and there and then lets you draw your own conclusions. An example would be the way Dandy's husband Hugh is clearly starting to suspect Dandy of having an affair. She has no idea that he's thinking this way. But the reader is allowed to pick up the very subtle and infrequent little hints that she drops and doesn't hit us over the head with them!

The mysteries are good. The language is rich and the characters feel authentic to the time.

I enjoy Dandy and the way the narration makes me think of Diary of a Provincial Lady with flashes of Wodehouse. Not sure about the grand (or petit) guignol plot elements.

The third in the Dandy Gilver series, this takes a turn for the dark, weird, and, in places, decidedly nasty (a warning for the squeamish: something unpleasant and quite, quite unnecessary happens to a cat toward the end). It's also, to be brutally honest, a bit of a mess – the plot never quite hangs together, the characters behave in the most erratic and irrational manners imaginable, and the ending is decidedly unsatisfactory. (There is also a very notable problem with a point of view shift, again toward the end of the book. As these stories are first-person narrated, it presents a bit of a problem when the narrator's rendered unconscious …) A disappointment.

Strange blend of mystery and superstition. Dandy investigates a stranger who is pouncing on ladies in the village and she's lured there by the pastor to investigate and to do a speech to the local ladies institute about budgeting. It didn't engage me like many others I've read.
There's a sideline about Dandy's husband realising that she's getting money from somewhere and hanging out with a young man occasionally. It just felt a little plodding.