Fetch

The dog went into the river. She only ever goes in to fetch. Midsummer in Kinloch Crescent, Edinburgh, and it never quite gets dark. Ishbel Rintoul, seventy-one, widowed, walks other people's dogs, and since March she has had one of her own: Mustard, a Dandie Dinmont with the dignity of a High Court judge, who has not yet forgiven her for it. Her newest client is Corrie, a retired gundog with a soft mouth and a habit of bringing everybody things that aren't theirs. Corrie's owner, eighty-year-old Grizel Abernethy, has a new friend: a charming dealer from Seville in a panama hat, who the whole crescent agrees is courting her for her late father's paintings. On the morning after the midsummer garden party, Ishbel finds him in the Water of Leith below the Dean Village weir. The police see a man with a bad hip who slipped in the dusk. But his stick is missing. And Corrie, who never paddles and never swims for fun, came home that night wet to the skin. With a detective sergeant who is still frightened of dogs, a gardens convener who wants dogs off the lawn, a retired advocate with a Newfoundland and a tin of shortbread, and her best friend Ina, who drove the 23 bus for thirty years and trusts nobody, Ishbel has to work out what the dog fetched, and who took it from her. Fetch is the second Kinloch Crescent Mystery: a warm, funny, fairly clued Scottish cosy with an older sleuth, a lot of dogs and absolutely no gore. A traditional cosy mystery: no gore, no on-page violence, no explicit content.