This volume is Number Four of Simon Brett’s alliterative murder mysteries set in the prosperous and benign-seeming county of West Sussex. Here, he takes us into the world of trustees ~ amateur volunteers ~ who are charged with running an estate, which in this novel consists of a country house and its grounds. Add to this that the house was home to a beloved author Esmond Chadleigh, and that the money is running out fast and you have the perfect setting for tension and drama.
One of the things I love about Simon Brett’s writing is how empathetically he writes about women. The strong characters in this novel are all women, from doughty but too-proper-for-her-own-good Carole Seddon, Bohemian neighbor Jude, young but accomplished Director of the Trust Gina, and Ex-Director Sheila Cartwright whose bullying makes Gina’s life a misery. And then there is American Professor Marla Teichbaum, a glamor puss, who is writing a biography of Esmond Chadleigh.
The other thing I love about Simon Brett’s writing is his close observation of middle-class mores in Britain. As the elder daughter, my mother impressed upon me all the things you were supposed to know about entertaining, from complex place-settings, to how to receive guests who’ve dropped in for a chat. Unlike the United States, in Britain, there are elaborate tea-making rituals. If you offer food, you must remember to prepare it in the kitchen, and bring it out on a tray to the sitting room. In an ideal world, you have a nest of tables at the ready so that each guest has a small table beside her chair on which to place her tea (served in a bone-china cup and saucer), and a matching plate with a small fork and a napkin. I think you have to be British for all this domestic detail to make you laugh, but laugh I did, as I’d forgotten all of these things that I knew by the time I turned eleven.
Needless to say a body turns up almost immediately in the kitchen garden. But one of my favorite scenes is where Sheila Cartright dresses down a gentleman who is Esmond’s grandson. I couldn’t help feeling glee as this powerful gentleman was crushed underfoot by a Boodica of a woman, even though I winced at his public humiliation, and the way she ruthlessly took away his life’s work, the writing of the Official Biography of Esmond Chadleigh.
Shortly thereafter, she is shot. Obviously the gentleman in question must have done it. Except, in Simon Brett’s hands, the murderer was someone you would never expect.
If you want to learn more about British society in the 2000s, this is the book for you. Five Stars.
