Customer Reviews

The Hanging in the Hotel (Fethering Mysteries)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you haven't read any of the earlier books in the series, let me make a brief introduction to the two amateur sleuths whose persistence, nosiness, and good luck will bring you much good fun. Carole Seddon is fairly recently retired, divorced, and introspective. Carole is careful in everything she does, including the impressions she makes. Her fairly new neighbor, Jude, is just the opposite. Jude (a woman her age who avoids using her last name . . . of which she has had at least two) has a mysterious background that seem to include lots of different men and a variety of alternative healing skills. Carole is good at bringing order to Jude's life, and Jude brings some excitement into Carole's existence. In four past books, they've teamed up in successful solutions to murders.

In The Hanging in the Hotel, Jude is pressed into service as a waitress for a catered event at her friend's hotel, Hopwicke Country House Hotel. Suzy Longthorne, the hotel's owner, is Jude's age, but Suzy has kept the looks that once made her face and figure a regular feature in the tabloids. Suzy has however fallen on hard times. She's divorced and all of her money is tied up in the hotel. Her once-exclusive place for the rich, famous, and affluent wannabes now has to scramble for crumbs . . . which is what it's like to host the Pillars of Sussex, an unusually misogynistic group of local male movers and shakers. As the men drink too much and say obnoxious things, Suzy and Jude just grin and bear it.

Jude is jolted however when the happy young man she helped into bed turns up dead by hanging the next morning. Everyone is quickly convinced it's suicide, except Jude. A cover-up also seems in the works, along with continual pressure on Jude to change her mind. Carole Seddon is brought into Jude's investigation, and the two are soon off turning rocks over.

Carole's life is also turned a bit upside down by the news that her only child is engaged and wants Carole to meet his fiancée. This development also adds new windows onto the development of Carole as a character in the series.

A lot of the humor in the book is extremely heavy handed. But it's still in good fun as you see people go to great lengths to secure small advantages for themselves. But behind the humor, there's the dark face of evil. Simon Brett does a good job of hinting at the evil and letting you use your imagination. If you think about what's hinted here, the ham-handed humor will remind you of how Shakespeare used clowns and fools to lighten his darkest tragedies.

I thought that the implied evil was the best part of the book. Without that element, this would have been an average mystery at best.

This is the fifth book of the Fethering mysteries. The main character is a holistic healer, Jude, assisted by her next-door neighbor Carole Seddon (who used to work at the Home Office). Jude is helping out at the upscale Hopwicke Country House Hotel (as she has done before) for a meeting of a men's group called the "Pillars of Sussex" whose members are aptly described by the editorial review above as "well-connected, philanthropic, and unashamedly chauvinistic" and "known for their heavy drinking and dubious dealings." As you might suspect, a wannabee Pillar is found dead. Is it murder? Is it suicide? You'll really enjoy the journey to find out.

THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL by Simon Brett brought to a close my interest in this series. Too much indulgence in the current British social scene and too little exploration of the off beat sleuths that originally made the series so much fun.
The Pillars of Sussex, a group of businessmen come off as a bunch of dirty old men who have too little to do with their time and too great an ego to understand they are deadly dull.
Even Jude and Carole become infected with the dullness of a lower order social club.
Nash Black, author of SINS OF THE FATHERS.

Interesting, entertaining, generally enjoyable. Too much back-tracking for me, especially early on. Original ending!

The cover hype promises a comic social satire. What you find inside is a running series of sour, authorial jabs at various aspects of current English middle class culture. The mystery itself is workmanlike, but neither of the dogged pair of sleuths is particularly likeable. All in all, a ho-hum and disappointing read.