Guilt at the Garage by Simon Brett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This piece of fluff might easily have been imagined as an outline for a one-episode TV mystery. There’s not much to it. I’m learning more about what publishers do to make a book marketable, and it isn’t pretty. A couple of posts ago I mentioned a 500-page that was squeezed down to 350 pages by use of small font and narrow margins. This book, at a scant 185 pages, is stretched to feel larger by use of extra-thick paper and some pointless digressions in the story.
The heroines are two single ladies in a small English town who double as amateur sleuths. They look into the mysterious death of an elderly garage owner who dies from a gearbox falling on him in the service pit. It’s all quite implausible, but the book is populated with a collection of zany characters and village life in rural England is skewered good-naturedly. It’s a quick and inoffensive read.