Joanna is the kind of nanny who works for very wealthy families indeed—the kind of role that also ideally places her to work as a spy. Her skills come in particularly handy just now, as someone appears set on kidnapping her newest charge, three-month-old heir to a cosmetics company fortune Benedict.

I've really enjoyed the historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett's that I've read, so when I saw a couple of books in this "Dolly and the..." contemporary mystery series of hers in a secondhand bookshop, I picked them up right away. Unfortunately, that slightly opaque prose style of hers which works so well in the Lymond Chronicles just frustrated me in a 70s context. I did like Joanna and the book is fast-paced from the get-go, but Johnson Johnson—the Lymond-lite, very rumpled agent who is apparently the character who links all the books in this series—bored rather than charmed me and the ironic archness of the tone warred for me with the darker elements of the plot.

Also, I get that the '70s were a different time, and that Dunnet was a white aristocrat from Scotland, but wow is there just a lot of ongoing casual racism and use of slurs. I really didn't get on with this book at all, and I think both it and the other installment in the series that I bought will be going right back to the charity shop. ( )

Good espionage thriller though there are some dated attitudes - I was a bit surprised that the 1970s still had a good bit of 1950s Cold War feel to it. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2020/04/2020035-dolly-and-nanny-bird-dorothy.html ( )

I've been cataloging my books online for a few years now, but looking back it's odd that some of the writers for whom I have the greatest love barely rate a mention, due to my possibly arbitrary decision to just add books as I read them. I could explain why I do this except I can't remember and I'm sure it was a dreadfully boring reason and why the heck should anyone care? Various editions of the novels of Dorothy Dunnett take up about two whole bookshelves all by themselves, and yet this is the first of her novels to turn up on my Goodreads! This is both uninteresting and insignificant! Yet I'm noting it anyway. Anything to avoid company.

Joanna Emerson is one of Johnson Johnson's dolly birds, young women who, whatever their other qualities, tend to score high on intelligence and resourcefulness, be single and have a well-defined trade which they are rather good at, all in contrast to the casual sexism of the oh-so-seventies titles. This is Dunnett: ironies abound. Back to Joanna, highly trained nanny who, after a difficult adventure on a train in the middle of a freezing Canadian tundra, ends up employed by a rich New York couple to mind their new-born baby. Deeper agendas have conspired to bring this about, aided by the machinations of yachtman and portrait painter and freelance troubleshooter for British Intelligence, Johnson Johnson. Dodging kidnap attempts ostensibly aimed at the bawling heir, negotiating the marital difficulties of her employers and the social climbing of the family next door, Joanna provides an excellent service, provided she can survive.

These are rather light, fast, fun books, though not without their darker, sharper, sadder moments. The hero - enigmatic, surpassingly clever, deeply manipulative but hiding nasty emotional and physical scars - is cast from the same mould as Lymond, Niccolo and Thorfinn, as are the supporting characters who provide us with our not entirely reliable view of them. The Dolly books, nevertheless, can be a bit of a mixed bag, and though not the best, this is certainly one of the better ones. ( )

A young nanny, with a gift for mathematics, helps Johnson Johnson foil an espionage scheme. ( )