A Messy Murder

August 1, 2024
Ellen Curtis, the decluttering expert of SpaceWoman, is called on to tidy up the suspicious death of her latest client's husband. Now that their daughters, Chloe and Kirsty, are grown and gone, Theresa Carter thinks it's high time that she and her husband downsize. Before they can leave Staddles, their spacious home outside the West Sussex village of Amberley, they'll have to get rid of clothing, books, papers, tools, and the rest. What may need downsizing most urgently is Humphrey Carter's ego. Though he's no longer a journalist or a chat show host, the approach of his 80th birthday finds him still a freelance celebrity trailing clouds of glory, at least in his own skies. Humph's self-infatuation has crashed to an end by the time Ellen finds him dead from an overdose of sleeping pills in his bottle of Famous Grouse--exactly the recipe he'd once prescribed for octogenarians in a column for the magazineRant Ellen finds at his side. The circumstances scream suicide, but Theresa's not so sure. She wants Ellen to look deeper into the case, and her recommendation of Ellen's services to Niall Fitzpatrick, the longtime producer of Humph's TV show whose wife died of cancer six months ago, seems designed specifically to help Ellen gather more evidence. But that won't be easy, since Ellen's also busy helping her friend Dodge figure out who's stealing the wood he's recovered from old houses and dealing with the drama provided by her own children, animator Ben and online fashion writer Jools, whose stint of working for SpaceWoman after a mysterious breakdown clearly won't last forever. Solid, unspectacular, and, despite its title, as economically told as if the story had been decluttered itself.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 20, 2024
Houses hold secrets. Nobody knows this better than Ellen Curtis, a professional declutterer and amateur sleuth in Chichester. While clearing out houses and flats, Ellen has uncovered hidden crimes and the occasional dead body. In this, the fourth in Brett's Decluttering Mysteries series, the wife of former journalist and TV personality Humphrey Carter, now a bitter has-been, hires Ellen to help them downsize from their huge Victorian mansion. The morning after Carter's 80th birthday party, during which he gave a spiteful speech that insulted his wife, daughters, son-in-law, and former colleagues, Ellen arrives to clear Carter's study and finds him slumped over his desk, dead. Police rule Carter's death a suicide, but his wife encourages Ellen to investigate the attendees at Carter's birthday party. This mystery is a treat in so many ways. Ellen is a first-person narrator, so we get her insights on the plights of her clients. As she investigates, she also deals with her own messy life, including two grown, troubled children. The plot has some delightful echoes of Golden Age mysteries, as in ""people with motives to murder gathered for an explosive event, with a body then found in the study."" Brett laces the plot with show-biz details that fans of Brett's Charles Paris series will relish. This very special series grows more fascinating with each entry.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.