Simon Brett - "The Body on the Beach"

A wonderfully elegant English murder mystery. Not the most imaginative of plots in the whodunnit sense (I guessed fairly early on) but more than made up for by its two contrasting heroines, its humour and its terribly British South Coast setting. Simon Brett introduces a sparkling new crime series starring the redoubtable Carole Seddon and her worldly wise accomplice, Jude.
Very little disturbs the ordered calm of Fethering, a self-contained retirement settlement on England's southern coast. Which is precisely why Carole Seddon has chosen to reside there. So the last thing Carole expects to encounter in Fethering is a new neighbour with but one name and an obviously colourful past. 'Jude' was not really Fethering . . . but neither was the body Carole found on the beach. A body, it has to be said, that has disappeared by the time the police arrive. Only Jude is ready to believe what her neighbour says she saw - and from that moment on, the two women are resolved to turn detectives. This is one of a series of ‘Fethering’ novels. I must find more...



SIMON BRETT – Brett, born 1945, was a radio and tv producer before taking yup writing full time. He lives in an Agatha Christie style village on the South Downs. As well as the Fethering Mysteries series, he is also the author of the TV series ‘After Henry’, the radio series ‘No Commitments’ and ‘Smelling of Roses’, and the best-selling ‘How to be a little sod’. His novel ‘A shock to the system’ was filmed starring Michael Caine.

Some quotes...
....Fethering is its own little world of double-glazed windows and double-glazed minds.
...Allinstore had become an outlet for the National lottery, thus enabling the residents of Fethering to shatter their hopes and dreams on a weekly basis.
The architect who’d designed the new supermarket (assuming such a person existed and the plans hadn’t been scribbled on the back of a n envelope by a builder who’d once seen a shoebox) had placed two wide roof-supporting pillars just in front of the main tills.
...The room was like the nest of a kleptomaniac magpie.
...The local news had just started. It was fronted by the kind of gauche female newsreader who makes you realize that, bad though network presenters may be, there remain unimaginable depths of the television barrel yet to be scraped.