2008 mystery; ninth in Brett's Fethering Mysteries series (amateur
sleuthing). Jude drops into the local betting shop to take shelter
from a sudden hailstorm; another customer staggers out, and turns up
stabbed in an alley nearby.
He turns out to have been a Polish immigrant, and the people of
Fethering are ready to write it off as Foreigners' Problems. But even
his sister, who's come over for the formalities and starts looking
into the matter, doesn't know what he would have been doing in
Fethering, or anything about the "Fifi" he mentioned with his dying
breath.
Carole's main activity here is looking into the regulars at the
betting shop, which she inevitably regards as a Den of Vice, and of
course her errors will be corrected. (There's even the start of a
friendship, though it's quietly dropped from future books.) Jude looks
into a tenuous connection with the local university, and particularly
Andy Constant the terribly cool Lecturer in Drama Studies – another of
Brett's horrible people, but one with a certain superficial charm to
him. There's also a side note at a truly ghastly "old-fashioned
country pub".
It is unfortunate that the sister, an aspiring journalist, should talk
in broken English (not like any Pole I've met in the UK, whose English
is generally rather better than that of their hosts); and the mystery
itself is not at all hard to solve, in spite of several well-placed
red herrings, to the point that I became impatient with the
protagonists not spotting something really rather obvious. As often
before with Brett, things get started very slowly, but the second half
is much better-paced.
Still worth reading, but perhaps the stencil is starting to get a
little worn. Followed by The Poisoning in the Pub.
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