The Hanging in the Hotel

✍ Scribed by Brett, Simon

• Book ID: 108904729
• Publisher: Pan Books
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 156 KB
• Series: Fethering 1
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781101204757

✦ Synopsis

The Hopwicke Country House Hotel is to host an event for the all-male society, The Pillars of Sussex. Jude helps out on the night, and in the early hours of the morning she watches with relief as the rowdy guests drag themselves to their beds. The next morning, one young solicitor is absent from breakfast. But when Jude heads for Nigel Ackford�s room, presuming he is feeling the effects of the night before, she is horrified to find him hanging from the beams of his four-poster bed . . . Was it suicide? Jude has her doubts. Enlisting the support of her neighbour, Carole, she makes some tentative enquiries. It soon transpires that The Pillars of Sussex are involved in a conspiracy of misinformation. 'Brett, the celebrated crime writer, delivers another light-hearted, suspense filled success' Daily Express

From Publishers Weekly

Prolific British author Brett's fifth Fethering mystery (after 2003's Murder in the Museum) featuring Carole Seddon offers comfortable pacing and plenty of plot twists. Carole's pal Jude Nichols bails out an old friend by waiting tables at the Hopwicke Country House Hotel, once the playground of the very rich and very famous. Hopwicke and its owner, former model Suzy Longthorne, have fallen on hard times since 9/11, and the hotel has been forced to accept a far less sophisticated clientele, like the Pillars of Sussex men's club. The Pillars have a long and spotty history of philanthropy, but are far better known as a group of carousing gentlemen with friends in high places. When a possible inductee is found hanged in his room, only Jude believes it wasn't a suicide. The Pillars all tell the same story, the police are convinced with little investigation and even Suzy, who found a threatening note before the inductee's death, suddenly clams up. Jude turns to Carole, and the two try to untangle a tightening web of lies. The entertaining supporting cast includes a chef with attitude and a slew of solicitors, one of whom is maddeningly smitten with Carole.
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From Booklist

Starred Review An Edwardian country house converted into a sumptuous hotel, complete with sweeping views of the South Downs and the English Channel, provides the setting for two murders in Brett's fifth Fethering mystery. This may sound like another fraying-around-the-edges formulaic cozy, but not in the hands of Brett, who once constructed backstage, behind-the-mike British theater mysteries starring an alcoholic, fading actor-sleuth. Brett infuses his plots with scathing and hilarious social commentary; reading him is very much like deciphering Hogarth's pictorial send-ups of low and high society. Brett's latest sleuths are middle-aged women in the seaside village of Fethering-- Carole Seddon, an early-retired, acerbic refugee from the Home Office, and her neighbor, Jude, a blowsy, New Agey freethinker. They have stumbled upon (and over) bodies on the beach, on the Downs, and on the grounds of a museum. Jude has the honors of finding a body this time as she helps out at the local hotel--the body of a young man strangled by a cord on a four-poster bed. Even odder than the man's death is the fact that seemingly everyone wants to dismiss this and a subsequent death at the hotel as accidental or suicide, especially the members of the all-male, all-powerful Pillars of Sussex, to which one victim belonged and the other aspired. Intricate plotting and wry comedy make this the best Fethering yet. Connie Fletcher
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved