Excerpt from Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

• Hodder & Stoughton, December 2010.
  ISBN: 978-0340 992975. Hardback £19.99.

• Hodder Paperbacks , April 2011.
  ISBN: 978-0340 992982, Paperback £7.99.

Whatever I was expecting when I decided to take a turn around Dunfermline — I was early for my appointment and it was a particularly pleasant day — it was not this air of jubilance. Indeed, if one were taxed with naming five jubilant towns and ran out of inspiration after Paris, Barcelona, New Orleans and Rio one would not search for the fifth in Scotland's gazetteer. (And if one were taxed with naming five jubilant towns in Scotland and did not, for some reason, face the facts and pay the forfeit right away, I daresay Dunfermline would still not spring to mind.)

Yet I could not help but notice that, today at least, the whole town effervesced in the most remarkable way. The whole city, I should properly say, for — as Hugh never tires of reminding me with much retelling of the glories of King Robert and the shenanigans of Malcolm Canmore — Dunfermline is a city and one groaning with history too: the birthplace of Charles I and more lately (not to mention more beneficially to the world at large) Andrew Carnegie. Indeed, I was passing the Carnegie library now, thinking how generous it was of him to endow it, since here was one place he might have expected to get a library named after him anyway.

As for the present mood, the weather had to be responsible for some of it, but soft spring sunshine and the kind of gentle breeze that teases at hat ribbons and turns the new leaves over to show their silvery undersides only go so far and further explanation was needed for the exuberance of the window displays in the small shops along Abbot Street and up the Kirkgate, the newly planted flower beds glimpsed through the park gates, as neat as samplers with their white pansies and pink tulips stitched into the smooth brown backing, and the giddy high spirits of the girls who flitted about in giggling pairs and threesomes, all decked out in their new spring costumes and with their shingles glistening

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