The Body on the Beach
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
'A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans' P. D. JAMES
'One of the wittiest crime writers around' ANTONIA FRASER
'Murder most enjoyable' COLIN DEXTER
Very little disturbs the ordered calm of Fethering, a pleasingly self-contained retirement town on England’s southern coast. Which is precisely why Carole Seddon, who has left behind both her husband and her career at the Home Office, has chosen to reside there. So Carole is surprised to encounter a new neighbour with one name and a colourful past. 'Jude' is not really Fethering . . . but even she is not as surprising as the body Carole finds on the beach.
A body, it has to be said, that has disappeared by the time the police arrive. Only Jude is ready to believe what Carole says she saw – and from that moment on, the two women resolve to turn detective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of Brett's witty Mrs. Pargeter and Charles Paris mysteries will cheer this buoyant launch of a series set in the English seaside town of Fethering (mischievously situated "not far from Tarring"). It's here that Carole Seddon, a fiftyish divorcee late of the Home Office, has settled, content to live a sensible, orderly retirement. But two events conspire to disrupt Carole's rigid routine: the arrival of an alarmingly casual new neighbor who insists on being called, merely, "Jude"; and the discovery of a dead middle-aged male on the Fethering beach. When Carole informs the police about the body, they dismiss her as a menopausal hysteric; after all, their subsequent search of the area yielded no trace of evidence. But when a haggard, drug-deranged woman appears at Carole's door with a gun, demanding to know if Carole located a knife on the body, Carole realizes that the corpse had been moved just before the police search. When a local teenage boy is found washed up on the beach, it's Jude who convinces Carole that the two deaths are somehow connected--and deserving of the two neighbors' full attention. Carole and Jude have surprising depth as characters, even though Brett overplays his hand in refusing to reveal any details of Jude's former life, including her surname. But the yin/yang relationship of the women is both mysterious and wholly believable, and the seacoast setting is so vivid you can taste the salty air. For late-summer beach reading, this is a cracking good choice.
