Eleventh in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur sleuthing).
A local bric-a-brac shop is burned down, but the body found inside it
was shot first. Carole Seddon and Jude investigate again.
But first there's Christmas to get through, and this section is
Carole's in a way we haven't seen since The Hanging in the Hotel
(fifth in the series). All too often she's the butt of Brett's jokes
as narrator, but this time, admittedly because of the forcible
loosening-up she's experienced over the course of the various murders
she's encountered and her experiences with Jude, she does manage to
function like a decent approximation of a human being, having her son
and family over for Christmas lunch and keeping her ex-husband from
horning in. (Yes, all right, if you haven't read previous volumes you
won't grasp just how much of a step that is for her.)
As for the secondary characters who give this series its legs, there's
a superannuated Svengali from the Sixties who's more talked-about than
on-stage, an old boy living in a beach hut, and a seriously deluded
ageing hippy, among others. The only returning characters are Carole's
family, though there's occasional mention of people from earlier books
in the series.
The mystery? Well, it's there, I suppose, but it's ten chapters before
anything illegal happens, and as usual with this series it's not much
of an exercise in deduction. Some clues are laid down with all the
subtlety of a T-72, and there was even a moment when I wanted,
presumably with the author's connivance, to shout "you are leaping to
a conclusion that is not supported by the data". In this particular
case, to solve the mystery and pin the blame in the right place would
take several leaps well outside the evidence we're given; the
last-minute confession is a bit of a cliché, but it emphasises here
just how little admissible evidence there is.
Better than the previous volume, but still mind-candy reading rather
than any sort of serious mental exercise. Not for serious cerebral
mystery fans. While I've read this series from the beginning and would
recommend that others do likewise, I think the new reader shouldn't
feel lost here.
Followed by Bones Under the Beach Hut.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.