After the Armistice Ball

If you like Nancy Mitford, you'll love this series. The writing is truly impeccable, the story is riveting, and the details really transport you back in time. It's almost as if the author really DID live back then. I fell in love with Dandy and relate to her so easily. I read so many books, and adore this era, but this series is the best I've found in quite a long time. Dandy's story is a great great pleasure to me. I hope more people read this series and enjoy it as I do.

Shortly after the signing of the Armistice which ended WW1, British society was trying to recover some of the ways of easy living which was their lot before the war. Taxes and changes in society were altering the lives of the formerly wealthy and changes in attitudes placed people in very different positions from those which they previously took for granted. Socialite, Mrs.Duffy, claimed that her extraordinary diamond parure was stolen and replaced with paste replicas, after the Ball and accused an insurance company of trying to swindle her out of her just dues. A friend of socialite, Dandy Gilver, is the wife of the head of the insurance company and pleads with Dandy for help in bringing the culprits to justice. Dandy , with her children away at boarding school, is bored with her life, bored with her stuffy husband and sees herself as a glamorous sleuth. At Mrs.Duffy's holiday cottage. a huge fire razes the place to the ground and apparently takes the life of the newly engaged younger daughter of the house. Dandy enlists the help of the fiance of the supposedly dead girl and uncovers a trail of murder and deceit, which points directly to the girl's mother. I loved reading about the fashions and manners of the very wealthy of this period but found the whole story to be just too wordy amd meandering to be a genuinely gripping murder/mystery.