The Turning Tide (Book 14)

"The perfect literary treat for a rainy Sunday afternoon" Red Magazine (best crime and thriller list)

It’s the breezy Scottish summer of 1936 and aristocratic sleuth Dandy Gilver, along with trusted colleague Alec Osborne, has been called to solve the strange case of the Cramond Ferrywoman, on the Firth of Forth. 

From their cheerless digs in a local stately home, Dandy and Alec  track Vesper Kemp, the ferrywoman, to a tiny tidal island. She seems to have lost her mind, roaming the beaches in rags, ranting about snakes and mercury.

What is even more troubling, is that Vesper claims she murdered Peter Haslett, a young man who fell into the river,   trying to row past one of its four water mills, and drowned. A group of worried Cramond residents – the minister,, the  innkeeper and the lady of the big house -  are determined that Vesper is innocent. But with the four local millers themselves remaining oddly tight-lipped and with all the suspicious strangers who lurk about the village, Dandy and Alec have their work cut out for them. And they closer they get to the answers they seek, the stronger the sense that  great danger lies beneath the surface of  these murky waters.

 

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"McPherson's vivid 14th Dandy Gilver mystery ... does a masterly job capturing the feel of rural Scotland and the mores of pre-WWII Britain." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

 

It takes a skilled writer to tell a story of another time as though they were there, but Catriona McPherson pulls it off with aplomb ... sharp wit and an Agatha-Christie-style ability to creat a lively cast of characters" WOMAN'S WEEKLY

"exactly the kind of descriptive prose one would expect from the upper classes of the 1930s, and with a great pinch of humour and a sprinkling of absurdity, McPherson beautifully evokes the feelings and images of post-war Edinburgh"      THE WEE REVIEW