Mrs Pargeter's patio

The ninth in the Mrs. Pargeter series, starring a well-off widow who seems blithely unaware that her late husband ran a criminal empire, is a comic caper on par with the finest by Brett, who won the 2014 Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger Award for an outstanding body of work in crime fiction. When Mrs. Pargeter trips over a paving stone on the patio built for her Chigwell, Essex, mansion by one of her husband's former associates, "Concrete Jacket," she discovers a skull underneath. Mrs. Pargeter doesn't immediately go to the police. Instead, to figure out how the skull got there, she contacts her husband's former colleagues, who include a locksmith, a disguise artist, a plastic surgeon, a getaway driver-turned-chauffeur, and a thief-turned-private eye, all fiercely devoted to her (and wonderfully written). A subplot, involving Mrs. Pargeter's gardener, whose reggae musician father disappeared decades ago, dovetails beautifully with the main plot, leading to a harrowing climax. The book draws its vibe from '20s gangster movies, but Brett also satirizes contemporary TV game shows in a gardening contestant show with a snarky host, the insider details of which will thrill fans of his theatrical Charles Paris mysteries. Pure fun.

An unfortunate discovery triggers another dunk in the pool of felons the late Lionel Pargeter ran with for his imperturbably ignorant widow. The trouble with Melita Pargeter's patio is that there's a skeleton buried beneath it. It's not the first time a body has been found on the construction site, but the 25 years since Mrs Pargeter's Plot (1998) have lulled the homeowner into a deceptive sense of placidity. As so often before, Mrs. Pargeter reaches out to private investigator Truffler Mason, an ex-crook who worked closely with her husband, and he reaches out to a long list of variously shady types from builder Concrete Jacket, who's now in prison once more, to makeup artist Tina the Transformer and plastic surgeon "Melting Maurice" Sinclair, for their help in identifying the corpse and explaining how it came to its final resting place. The news that villainous Chippie Lex frequently hired Marek Grabowski, the Polish builder who worked with Concrete on the project, to hide awkward bodies produces a strong air of suspicion, especially since Concrete refuses to add Mrs. Pargeter to his visitors list. Relief is promised by Mrs. Pargeter's interest in the private life of her gardener, Kirstie Rollins, a former burglar whose father disappeared on her ninth birthday. But the two cases inevitably turn out to be connected, and the responsible parties behind them both are pretty obvious from early on. Even so, fans will appreciate Brett's customary inventiveness in unveiling crimes and misdemeanors old and new and the wit of the elaborate circumlocutions with which all interested parties disavow any criminal intent. A one-joke story, but the joke is a rich one. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.