Fall of a Philanderer
A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery, No 14

by Carola Dunn

     Pregnant with her first child and feeling great, Daisy is enjoying a vacation by the seaside in Devon.  Accompanying her are her stepdaughter Belinda and Belinda's Indian school friend Deva; husband Alec is expected at the weekend.  But before then Daisy has found yet another body, this time lying on the beach after falling from the clifftops.  The man was the unpopular town flirt and hotelier George Enderby, and nobody seems to have a good word for him, so there are plenty of suspects.  But one of them is surely not Sid, the simple, dumb fellow who lives in a hut on the beach and who has been befriended by Daisy’s two charges prior to being arrested.

I love this series for many reasons.  It manages to recall a more innocent age of seaside vacations with their simple pleasures, and also evokes the style of classic era whodunit writers.  As I often mention in these reviews I applaud the way each book manages to be relatively dissimilar to the others, and this time sees Daisy away from both London and high society.  There are fewer characters after the dizzying number in A Mourning Wedding (also reviewed on this site), and this is all to the good, as we learn more about them and suspect each one in turn.  I didn’t guess whodunit, and once again this is a fairly complex plot with many twists and turns.  Ms Dunn has also created a very well-realized backdrop to set her story against, and as an inhabitant of Devon myself I thought it most authentic.  All these elements combine to make yet another good book.

Reviews of other titles in this series

Death at Wentwater Court, 1
The Winter Garden Mystery, 2
Requiem For A Mezzo, 3
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, 4
Damsel in Distress, 5
Dead In The Water, 6
Styx and Stones, 7
Rattle His Bones, 8 [review 1] [review 2]
To Davy Jones Below, 9
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, 10
Mistletoe and Murder, 11
Die Laughing, 12
A Mourning Wedding, 13
Fall of a Philanderer, 14
Gunpowder Plot, 15
The Black Ship, 17
Sheer Folly, 18
Anthem For Doomed Youth, 19
Gone West, 20