Review | Book review: Beloved detective Agatha Raisin uncovers yet more depravity in rural England
M.C. Beaton’s opinionated fictional sleuth is back in as enjoyable a 192 pages as it’s possible to imagine
By M.C. Beaton
Constable
With autumn coming, you can practically smell the crime fiction hitting the shelves. The guts. The DNA samples. The alcoholic middle-aged men subsisting on a diet of 1970s rock and women half their age.
For more than two decades, M.C. Beaton has provided a cheerful, intelligent and gently spiky alternative to the blood and thunder, selling truckloads of copies of her Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin series. A public relations guru in a former life, Raisin is opinionated, impatient and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. These include land developer Lord Bellington, who had planned to turn her village allotments into a housing estate.
Having failed to make the miserly curmudgeon see the error of his ways, Raisin – like many others in Carsley village – is not entirely unhappy at news of his poisoning. The question does remain: is one of those celebrating a murderer? The police suspect Bellington’s son and heir, Damian, who promptly hires Raisin to clear his name.
Add in a handsome rival in the detecting stakes and a second victim found in the allotments, and you have as enjoyable a 192 pages as can be imagined.