Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit

Dandy is drawn to a convent on a bleak Lanarkshire moor to investigate a series of disturbances which followed the destruction of the chapel by fire on Christmas Eve and the death of the Mother Superior in the same fire. At the same time Alec is asked to the same moor to help his old friend who is accused of setting the fire and killing Mother Mary. Alec's friend is suffering shell-shock, or PTSD as we would call it now, and is living in a psychiatric hospital, which had a prisoner break-out on the same night that Mother Mary died. The acting Mother, also called Sister Mary confusingly, wants to unravel the mystery of Mother Mary's death, and her last words, and suspects that disturbances since then are not the acts of the two inmates who remain on the loose, but are in fact perpetrated by one of the sisters. This is another highly satisfying murder mystery. As they used to say on the tv show Through The Keyhole, 'the clues are there' and indeed they were. I noticed the significance of some of the descriptions and had my suspicions but nothing like the elegance of the final solution, even if it did require the perpetrators to explain their motives Scooby Doo-style :)