The Corpse on the Court

December 3, 2012
Court tennis—the ancestral form of lawn tennis played by Henry VIII—provides the backdrop for Brett’s absorbing 14th Fethering mystery (after 2011’s Guns in the Gallery). Court tennis enthusiast Piers Targett introduces his new lover, amateur sleuth Jude, to the game at a club near her Sussex home. Early one morning, the pair arrive at the club to find an elderly member lying on the court, dead of a heart attack. Suspecting foul play, Jude resolves to look deeper into the death. Meanwhile, Jude’s good friend and neighbor, Carole Seddon, pursues a missing person’s case involving an adopted teenage girl of Russian origin who disappeared from home several years before. As the two investigations converge, Jude finds an important clue in a self-published court tennis memoir by a club member that apparently no one else has read. That Piers’s bedtime efforts to explain the arcane rules of the game put Jude quickly to sleep is another amusing touch.

December 1, 2012
Propelled by spite (in Carole's case) and love (in Jude's), the Fethering ladies embark on separate investigations. Jude is so besotted with Piers Targett that she hasn't given a thought to her alternate therapy practice or schmoozed with her neighbor Carole for two weeks now. Carole doesn't know about the new man in Jude's life, but to dispel the doldrums and prove she doesn't care that she hasn't heard from her friend, she's looked over old crime stories and decided to tackle the unsolved Lady in the Lake mystery, a cause celebre seven years ago. Jude meanwhile has taken up Piers' obsession, real tennis, a sport much admired in Henry VIII's reign and nearly as incomprehensible as cricket. Unfortunately, her first lesson at tony Lockleigh House coincides with the death of Reggie Playfair, who collapses on court. Reggie's wife, suspecting that he was meeting a lover there, asks Jude to investigate. Ever intrepid, Jude unearths various late-night courtside trysts, a wannabe ghost wandering around in her wedding dress, a liaison begun years back in Paris and a wife to whom Piers still seems emotionally attached. Carole's equally dramatic venture leads her to a mother still grieving over her long-lost child, a father who so loathes his ex that he's erased her from his press releases and CV, and an abusive Russian who smacks his wife around. When Carole and Jude finally reunite and discuss their cases, resolution is produced by the one name common to both. Top-flight Brett (Guns in the Gallery, 2012, etc.), with droll potshots at flawed husbands, the women who shouldn't have married them, rabid sports enthusiasts and quasi-tiffs among friends.

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February 1, 2013

In this 14th series entry (after Guns in the Gallery) Jude's new man has a love of tennis, but the game takes a turn when a man dies on the court. Meanwhile, Jude's neighbor Carole is doing some sleuthing of her own to discover the identity of the "Lady in the Lake." The women soon discover their cases are connected.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2012
Fictional Fethering is a tiny West Sussex village that, in the best Agatha Christie tradition, has an inordinate number of murderers living there or just passing through and leaving one or two bodies behind. Fethering also boasts two remarkable fiftysomething womenone, Jude, a specialist in alternative healing techniques, and the other, Carole, a brittle and bitter divorcee who could use some healing herself. The two have formed an unlikely but flourishing friendship. They've also developed a knack for defying the local constabulary and solving murders. In this, the fourteenth in this series, Jude takes a new lover whose passion is the arcane game of real tennis (not court or clay tennis), and who insists she learns the sport. On their first outing to a Victorian country house that has an enclosed court on the grounds, the pair stumbles upon the body of one of the elderly male tennis players. Jude is willing to leave this case to the police, except that all the club members, including her lover, are behaving in ways that cry for a closer look. Meanwhile, Carole has reopened files on a cold case, the Lady in the Lake, just to keep her wits sharp. Fethering followers will love the way Brett showcases Jude here, showing new vulnerable bits. For everyone else, Brett performs his magic on the traditional cozy, making the frame rock with laughter at human foibles and quake with well-placed surprises.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)