Rating: WARTY!
This one I picked up from the library on spec. It's book one of "The Fethering Mysteries", Fethering being the quaint English village in which the mysteries are found, but given how tiny the village is, I find it had to believe a whole series can reasonable be conjured from it, and having listened to one disk of this, I decided I certainly had no interest in a series on the topic.
The novel was published in 2000, but it reads like it was written in the fifties. The main character was quite simply unlikeable. Whether she's in the entire series, I don't know, but she's not someone I'm interested in, although to the author's credit, she's an older woman and not some air-headed, cupcake-baking, superficial busy-body which topic seems to have become quite the trend of late. This audiobook was read by Geoffrey Howard, and it was a bit tedious to listen to. If you imagine the perky guy who used to read the old Pathé News films, but having a really tragic day, that's how this one was read.
The story is that this woman is out walking her dog and encounters a dead body on the beach apparently washed up by the tide. She returns to her house (evidently she has no cell phone) and instead of calling the police at once, she washes her dog, then cleans her kitchen, then calls the police, by which time the body has disappeared. Shortly after he skeptical police leave, a strange and possibly drug-abusing woman appears at her door with a gun, threatening her to say nothing more about the body, before fleeing the house when someone else knocks at the door. How this second woman even knew where to find the first is a mystery, but the first disk was as far as I wished to go, so maybe some of that mystery is unveiled later. This was not for me, and I certainly can't recommend it based on what I listened to .
