Guns in the Gallery

January 23, 2012
Louise Penny fans will enjoy Brett’s 13th cozy set in the West Sussex town of Fethering (after 2011’s Under the Beach Hut), even if the plot and depth of characterization don’t approach the high standard of Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels. Series heroine Carole Seddon reluctantly attends a private view entitled “Gun Culture” at a modern art gallery, where she and her good friend, Jude, hear an uncomfortably high-volume lovers’ spat that leads to a suicide. Certain that there’s more than meets the eye to the death, Carole and Jude once again turn amateur sleuths. While the investigation and resolution satisfy, the book’s chief pleasure lies in its sardonic character descriptions. Of a self-made businessman who likes to pontificate, Brett says, “He read widely, and if his assimilation of all he read was not always very deep, he did not let that prevent him from filling his conversation with frequently inapposite quotations and references.”

March 1, 2012
If someone's prone to suicide, is it OK to lend a helping hand? Fennel Whittaker tried to kill herself in a Pimlico flat a few years back. Her sister Chervil found her and called on their dad to hush the matter up. So when she's discovered with her wrists slashed, a suicide note beside her, in one of the yurts due to open soon as a therapy spa on the family's West Sussex estate, most everyone, including the police, thinks that she finally managed to do herself in. But Jude, the Fethering healer who'd been treating her, disagrees, insisting that her client had been feeling quite chipper. Along with her neighbor Carole, Jude had witnessed Fennel's outburst at the Cornelian Gallery's private showing of Denzil Willoughby's conceptual art, when she seemed to be blaming him for an obscure past misdeed. Perhaps Fennel died by his hand, not her own. Other possible suspects include Chervil, whose boyfriend, the son of Bonita the gallery owner, once romanced Fennel; the girls' mum, who seems relieved that Fennel's fragile psyche will no longer be her problem; and whoever it is who took Fennel's mobile phone from the crime scene, obviously to delete an incriminating message. There'll be a disastrous outing on the sea and news of a long-thwarted love before the culprit is unmasked. Brett's usual cozy charm and flashes of wit (Bones Under the Beach Hut, 2011, etc.) are nowhere in evidence here. Perhaps it's time to retire the Fethering series and start something fresh.

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Starred review from January 1, 2012
Brett picks a perfect spot for his trademark blend of social satire and cozy mystery: an art gallery positioned on the High Street of the West Sussex village of Fethering. The gallery is giving a Private View showing of a controversial artist who uses guns and ammo for shock value. The showing draws a Restoration comedy's worth of characters from different worldsartists, socialites, would-be artists and socialites, members of the middle and upper-middle classes of Fethering, and the workers who set it all up. At the showing, the twentysomething daughter of a nouveau riche couple lashes out at the artist, once her lover, and is later found dead. Since the young woman had a history of depression, her slashed wrists are seen by police as a suicide method. Enter Brett's avocational detective duo, Jude and Carole (Jude is a New Age healer, Carole an uptight, retired Home Office worker), who sense that the dead woman was murdered. Brett expands the action from Fethering to a lavish country house to an artist's studio in London. As always, he pinions pretension perfectlyperhaps the most shocking detail in a mystery full of shocks is how the nouveau riche parents try to cover up any investigation of their daughter's death, so it won't interrupt their social climbing and the opening of their other daughter's glamping (glamorous camping) site. Readers of the Fethering series get both another distinctive cozy and a wonderful narrative arc tracing Jude and Carole's relationship and, especially, Carole's gradual thawing. Brilliant, biting, and fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)