Customer Reviews

Dead romantic

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Simon Brett's crime novels are always enthralling, especially if you listen to him reading them. If you are listening in your car, you are likely to overshoot your destination. If you reach your destination before his reading has finished, you might choose, as someone I know did, to drive around the block a few times to allow time to hear how it all ends.

Most are light-hearted, and most feature a less than flawless sleuth. This one is not light-hearted and has no sleuth. Brett presents us with a puzzle and challenges us to solve it. Be warned. Listen carefully to names, and pronouns. The puzzles pieces may not be what they appear to be.

Brett has contrived the puzzle with great skill. Almost every occurrence is plausible, although I find it hard to accept that a woman would wipe down kitchen benches while wearing "long Hollywood style evening gloves". You won't like any of the characters in this book, especially the female tutor whose every utterance is a cliché, but you'll admire the story-teller's skills.

Once you know that there's a shocking twist to the ending - and I don't think you need spoilers; the book jacket gives that much away - in what is basically a three-character book, it doesn't take much to figure out who the corpse is in the beginning and who the likely killer. The conspicuous absense of the victim's sex being mentioned in Chapter 1 will tell you where the misdirection is going. I admit to not catching on when the point of view switched a few times, but felt it was more cheating than actual cleverness when it was revealed, and also disappointing. In a murder mystery, one wants to have someone to care about, and the one possible sympathetic character turns out to be as vile as the others. The heroine's remarkable self-obsession and self-romanticizing are entertaining, but she's really quite loathesome and in the end, no more plausible than the other figures. It's a quick read, but you need a bit of a mental cleansing afterward.

Brett has written so many books, this must have been a few weeks' worth of thought and no more. It is tossed off with some style; but the plot, characters, and conclusion are slick and superficial.

Virginity and the way three different characters resolve their angst over that status is a theme of sorts in this novel. Madeline Severn is a 37-year-old tutor at a language school. One of her pupils, 19-year-old Paul, is virtually unable to think about anything else apart from how he can lose his virginity--preferably with Madeline. Madeline seems to be interested in someone else (another teacher at the institution), and Paul must deal with his feelings about a more suitable suitor for Madeline.

Things culminate in a remote cottage where, one weekend, Madeline plans to lose her virginity. A dead body is found in the cottage after the weekend, and the remaining living characters move along pleasantly with their lives. This despite the fact that one of them is a murderer! I won't read any more Simon Brett--there just isn't much thought or psychology to the characters, crime, or motives in this story.