The Mirror Dance by Catriona McPherson is the 15th book in the author’s Dandy Gilver series and I’ve read them all, but I was a wee bit disappointed with this one. In fact by the time I got to about 70 pages from the end of the book I had lost all interest in the outcome, but I struggled on. I’ll be generous and say that maybe it is all the horrendous news from Ukraine which had an effect on me.

The setting is mainly Dundee and St Andrews. There has been a murder in Dundee. A Punch and Judy man is done to death while Dandy was actually watching his puppet show in a park, despite having a front row view, she didn’t see anyone approaching the puppet booth. How was it possible?

The investigation involves two supposedly rival publishing companies, Doig’s Publishers and D.C. Thomson’s and a possible problem over copyright. There are plenty of twists and turns along the way, in fact maybe too many.

There are a few annoying mistakes, such as the mention of the shop/newspaper, magazine distributor W.H. Smith, which didn’t exist in Scotland until fairly recent years as it was John Menzies which had that business in Scotland. The setting for the book is 1937.

There are some phrases which seem unlikely in Dundee of the 1930s, such as ‘state of the art’. But the mention of cricket not being played in Scotland is just plain wrong. Cricket was very popular in many areas of Scotland and still is. I live near two villages which have cricket pitches which are still in use and one of them won the National Village Cricket Cup in 1985. There’s a cricket pitch and pavillion in Kirriemuir, the birthplace of J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame, and he actually donated the ground and pavillion to the town as he was a huge fan of cricket, as was Arthur Conan Doyle, they played it together.

Anyway, possibly I’m being too picky and this series has just run its course for me.