THE STABBING IN THE STABLES by Simon Brett

I love the way that author Simon Brett increases the difficulty of the challenge he faces as an author, as he ups the stakes of writing craft during the Fethering series.

In this volume of the Fethering series, THE STABBING IN THE STABLES, it is made vivid to us how amateur sleuths are at the mercy of a lack of evidence, a lack of forensic analysis and a lack of the whole police procedure apparatus that detectives enjoy.

So when Jude finds the dead body of a man in the local stables, who has been stabbed, she has to spend most of the novel wondering what the police think of this mysterious death. 

But that does not make this novel boring. Far from it, for the amateur sleuth pair of Jude (last name infrequently given) and her neurotic side-kick Carole Seddon are resourceful ladies, who manage to eventually figure out what is going on, sans police help.

Jude is a healer, and as the novel goes along she realizes that there is something very wrong with one of her clients Sonia Dalrymple. Sonia is connected to the stable world of West Sussex via her love of horses, but she frequently calls on Jude because she is in so much pain, she can scarcely move. Jude starts to notice a pattern in these problems. Sonia seems much more relaxed when her husband Nicky (an international banker) is away from home on one of his frequent trips abroad. When he is actually present, Sonia’s problems return. In the meantime, Carole strikes up a friendship with the self-absorbed Hilary Potter, whose teenaged daughter Imogen has a passion for horses,

Through such two disparate lines of inquiry, Jude and Carole are able to determine who really stabbed Walter Fleet and who is responsible for the “horse-ripper” mutilations of the mares in the surrouding countryside.

Although Simon Brett is a man, he writes with great sensitivity about women, including domestic violence (Sonia’s husband Nicky regularly beats her up) and divorce. Hilary Potter and her husband Alec are moving inexorably towards divorce, and the whole tension and drama around it are having a really negative effect on their teenaged daughter Imogen. There is no way to really make vivid to someone who has not experienced divorce just how devastating it can be for the child caught in the middle of it. As children have very little agency, they are forced to watch, helpless, as their family breaks apart. It is like having the rug pulled out from under you. It is like watching your house collapse, until it is a rubble of broken bricks and jagged stabs of glass. Nothing seems certain, everything seems chaotic, and the child in the middle often assumes that they must have done something terrible to bring this on.

This is the situation that thirteen-year-old Imogen finds herself in. She is not helped by her self-absorbed mother (whom she hates) or her unreliable father (whom she adores.) Not surprisingly, she is a very angry young lady who cracks under all this emotional pressure. Everything comes to a head near the end of this novel, which author Simon Brett manages to solve in a very satisfactory way. 

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