Product Description

After years of bullying others as a high-flying public relations boss, Agatha takes early retirement to a picture-perfect village in the Cotswolds. And how better to make friends than by entering the local quiche-making competition? To ensure first prize Agatha buys her entry at a London delicatessen. Alas, Agatha's perfect product is soon exposed - as not only store-bought but poisoned. The contest judge succumbs after eating it, and with him go Agatha's chances of rural bliss - unless she can discover the real poisoner...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7540 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Good Book Guide
"She's ratty and rude...a far cry from Chritie's detectives but she's our new village sleuth."

About the Author
M C Beaton was born in Scotland. Having spent many years working as a journalist on Fleet Street, she now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris.

Customer Reviews

Entertaining and very funny
This is a entertaining and very funny "whodunnit". The characters are very well drawn for a crime novel. The "detective", Agatha Raisin, is someone you can both like and dislike at the same time, and the other characters cover a good range from the normal to the farcical. There are some very funny, moments, and some observant swipes at small-town life. The "whodunnit" element of the story is almost incidental: it serves to carry the story forward and introduce us to the characters, but at times it verges on getting in the way of the good fun!

If you like hard-boiled, mean streets, police-procedurals, you'll hate this. If you just want a good, easy, comfortable read, you'll love it.

This is the first book in the Agatha Raisin series.

You won't be able to take your face out of it
Agatha Raisin is an awful woman but I promise that by the time you finish this book you will love her, warts and all.

A self-made woman who sells her business and retires early to her dream-cottage in the Cotswolds (furnished by an expensive interior decortator, naturally).

Agatha suddenly finds herself in a completely alien environment.

In a effort to make her mark on the village and announce her arrival, she plots to win the village Quiche baking contest. Her plan is simple - she will enter, as her own work, a quiche bought from a top-class delicatessan in London. Unfortunatly for Agatha, the judge dies after eating it and her deception is uncovered. Worse she finds herself being held responsible for his death.

And this is when you start finding your self falling for her.
From the moment the plot is hatched the reader can't fail to know the outcome, but rather than feeling righteous indignation on the part of the other contestants you can only feel sympathetic embarrasment for the situation you know Agatha is going to find herself in.

Convinced that she can redeem herself in the eyes of those around her Agatha sets off to solve a crime the police insist hasn't happened.

Miss Marple - on steroids!
Agatha Raisin couldn't be more different from the author's other well-known leading character - Hamish McBeth - if she tried.

Descending on a Cotswold village in seach of some kind of idealised retirement, after selling off her London PR agency for a substantial sum, Agatha quite quickly finds that the scenario she has dreamed up is just that - a dream - and village life is far more prosaic and easy going than anything she had prepared herself for.
Right up to the moment when she unwittingly becomes the instrument of a murderer's malicious plans.

As previous reviewers have mentioned, quite a lot of the book is spent familiarising us with Agatha, her past history, the village and so on. Given that the series now runs to more than a dozen books, is looks like the author could have spent a little less time on the background details, and a little more on the plot. Still, this book is completely representative of the series, and if you like this one you'll almost certainly like the rest.

To be frank, this isn't great literature, in fact it isn't really even comparable with Agatha Christie's stories. The village setting is there, and a bunch of village "characters", but Agatha has little of the insight into how other people tick than does Miss Marple, and her successes usually owe a lot more to brute force than skilful sleuthing. Though Agatha (Raisin, that is) does have her moments.

I get the feeling that these books are more about providing an easy, entertaining read than trying to join the band of detective fiction "immortals". And as such they work very well, indeed better than most of the current crop of "cozys", in my opinion.