Simon Brett - The Liar In The Library

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good read

I enjoyed The Liar In The Library very much.  Like so much of Simon Brett's work, it is entertaining and witty, but also has some excellent characterisation and some acute observations on modern life.

The plot?  It's not really the important thing, but after a talk in the library at to Fethering, a small, affluent village on the English South Coast, a successful author is found dead in his car.  Jude becomes a suspect and she and Carole investigate in their usual way.  It's a decent if slightly silly story with a lot of nods to Golden Age crime, which it acknowledges fully in the story.  What makes it so enjoyable is Brett's writing.

His style is easy to read and has a quiet excellence about it.  Jude and Carole's slightly spiky friendship works very well and there are some witty sallies at pretension in modern literary life – for example, "...the fact that his novel was just an old-fashioned romance with a happy ending had been disguised by enough tricks of postmodernism and magical realism for the literati not to feel they were demeaning themselves by reading it."  There are also some enjoyable, skewering portraits of a pompous author, a ridiculously arrogant academic and so on.  Brett also makes some quiet but important points about subjects like library closures, homelessness, xenophobia and so on which give the book rather more weight than you might expect.

In short, this isn’t Great Literature but it's witty, thoughtful in places and a very good read.  Recommended.