1992 mystery; fourth in Brett's Mrs Pargeter series (amateur
sleuthing). Mrs Pargeter keeps an old friend company at a visit to a
health spa, but Bad Things are going on there.
As so often with Brett, the plot is by the numbers: a particular
Bad Person is mentioned but doesn't seem to be among the cast. Well,
obviously he is going to be found among the cast. Whom could he be?
There's only one candidate. What he's apparently up to seems rather
bizarre, but everything does eventually more or less make sense.
The detective plot is mostly a framework on which to hang the other
things: a series of rants against the slimming industry (not badly
done, though you'd think from this that nobody ever had any legitimate
reason to lose weight) as well as a few other targets, and the
repetitive process by which Mrs Pargeter knows an old friend of her
late husband's who has just the skills she needs to deploy, and who's
happy to drop everything in order to use them on her behalf. "When I
think of everything your late husband did for me" is a phrase used
several times here, so I assume the repetition is deliberate. The joke
of the series is that Mrs Pargeter's husband was very obviously a
master criminal, but that this is never quite admitted in the
narrative; it's not much of a joke to sustain a series on,
particularly when Mrs Pargeter keeps accidentally falling over crimes
in the context of her ordinary life.
The difficulty of this is that she doesn't end up doing a great deal
of detection in her own right; she puts a few things together, but
most of the work is done by other people. As in the previous book she
ends up in a potentially lethal situation and gets out of it by no
virtue of her own. I do like my protagonists to do things.
So I was never particularly absorbed by this book. When someone was
told "you were used as the perfect front — and stool-pigeon in case
things went wrong" my reaction was "hang on, isn't a stool-pigeon a
grass, a snitch, a squealer, an informer? Not a patsy or sacrificial
lamb?" If I'd been carried along by the story, I'd have forgotten that
infelicity by the time it came to write this review.
It's OK. It doesn't get anything else particularly wrong. But it's not
good. Followed by Mrs Pargeter's Plot.
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