Guilt at the Garage

November 1, 2020
Wary readers can add Shefford's Garage to the list of places where things can go fatally wrong in the amber-preserved village of Fethering. Carole Seddon may have been a well-informed functionary of the Home Office, but she doesn't know a thing about cars. So when some vandal smashes the rear window of her Renault as she's enjoying a dinner at the local pub with healer Jude Nicholls, her friend and frequent partner in criminal investigation, she takes it to Bill Shefford and asks him to fix it. He recommends a glass-replacement specialist who turns out not to be on the list of specialists Carole's insurer will reimburse, but since Carole's "fear of doing something wrong was not as strong as her fear of drawing attention to herself," she burns the threatening follow-up note someone has left and pays for the repair herself. When Bill, working in a maintenance pit, is crushed to death by a gear box that falls out of Tom Kendrick's Triumph Tr6, Carole's recent experience makes her especially keen on working out who might have helped the unlikely weapon on its way. Malee Shefford, the Thai bride Bill wed less than a year ago? Billy Shefford, his son and heir-no-longer-quite-so-apparent? Listless, depressive Tom, who's kept afloat by his mother, Natalie? Jeremiah, the newly arrived healer who wants to join the uninterested Jude in opening a center for alternative healing and who briefly treated Tom before Natalie invited Jude to take on the unappetizing task? The thief who made off with Bill's will and his appointments diary? Or Carole's anonymous correspondent, who keeps sending her threatening notes? Very few guilty feelings around this garage but lots of quietly guilty behavior.

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November 30, 2020
Brett takes a shrewd look at the nasty side of village life in his slyly witty 20th Fethering mystery (after 2019’s The Killer in the Choir). When garage owner Bill Shefford, a longtime widower, returns home to Fethering, “a village of unimpeachable middle-class propriety, minding its own business in West Sussex on the South Coast of England,” from a vacation in Thailand with Malee, his beautiful new bride, the locals are quick to brand Malee a gold digger who’s out to cheat Billy, Bill’s son, out of his rightful inheritance. The noxious flow of village gossip escalates when a gearbox falls on Bill’s head while he’s working on a car, killing him. The tone darkens as the series leads—Carole Seddon, a straight-laced retired civil servant, and her zaftig neighbor, Jude Nichols, an alternative healer—investigate the circumstances surrounding Bill’s death. The disparate duo uncover a crime even more sinister than outright murder. Well-developed subplots support the intricate narrative. Brett proves once again to be a master of the amateur sleuth genre. Agent: Lisa Moylett, CMM Agency (U.K.).

Starred review from January 1, 2021
In this twentieth Fethering mystery (Fethering being a seaside village in West Sussex), Brett uses the investigation of a sudden death in a service garage to expose the slow drip of casual racism that pervades the village. Brett's two amateur sleuths, one a very regimented retired member of the Home Office, and the other a radically open-to-experience practitioner of complementary medicine, once again join forces to solve the mystery. Part of the fun of this series is seeing how the two women, thrown together by being neighbors, find it so hard to understand (or even to simply stand) each other. Carole Seddon, the Home Office retiree, is at the garage when the elderly owner is crushed by a falling transmission gearbox (he was in the inspection pit beneath a vintage Triumph at the time). Carole and her neighbor, healer Jude Nichols, use their contacts in the village to determine if the owner's death was an accident or something more sinister. Suspects abound; there's an inheritance at stake, with the future of the victim's son and his family threatened by the recent marriage of the owner to a young woman from Thailand. Brett is brilliant at showing how throwaway comments and casual snubs intensify cruelty to outsiders. This is an especially incisive Fethering adventure, with a shocker of an ending.

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