If you haven’t discovered Simon Brett yet, and you are British or an Anglophile, you really should. For not only does Brett write compelling cozies, but his stories are hilarious send-ups of Britishness.
In this volume, The Hanging in the Hotel (Number 5 of the Fethering Mysteries), Jude is forced to dress up as an Edwardian maid-servant, complete with a rather anachronistic mob cap (fashionable in the 18th-century rather than the 19th century) to help out best friend Susie, who owns a posh hotel called The Hopwicke Country House Hotel. Naturally, Jude finds a body, this time of a young man who is hung from a four-poster bed. Rather too quickly, everyone assumes that he has committed suicide. And by everyone I mean the police, the staff at the hotel and the members of the rather phallic-sounding Pillars of Sussex, an all-male group who justify their existence by their charitable works, when their real purpose is to drink way too much and tell off-color jokes about women.
And so Jude is suspicious. It all seems too convenient. And so she enlists the help of next-door neighbor Carole Seddon, an overly-fussy and rather rigid retiree, who used to work for the Home Office. Carole’s son Stephen is finally getting married and (gasp!) Carole discovers that she actually likes her son’s fiancée. The two women persist in their efforts, which include Carole indulging in a rather out-of-character flirtation with a local solicitor, all to extract information from him about the murder of the poor young man.
With glimpses into the lives of the extremely wealthy during the time of Tony Blair’s New Labour, and hilarious character-sketches of the kind of “womenfolk” who marry powerful men, this is yet another novel of manners, which draws a scathing portrait of the too-wealthy, too-smug and too-pretentious.
