Agatha Raisin is a feisty Mayfair businesswoman, whose lifelong dream has been to buy a cottage in the picturesque English Cotswolds. At the age of fifty-three, she realises that dream, selling her successful public relations business in preparation for a new life in the country. Agatha is a true townie, however, and finds it harder to fit into village life than she’d anticipated, the locals being wary of strangers they call ’incomers’. She decides to enter the village’s Great Quiche Contest but the snag is, Agatha has never made a quiche in her life, and so she decides to cheat, by nipping up to London to buy one from The Quicherie, renowned for its magnificent quiches. She doesn’t win of course, since the competition is being judged by a close friend of the eventual victor, and worse is to come for Agatha when the judge and his wife are found dead the next morning. Traces of a deadly poison are found among their stomach contents, the same poison which is later found in the remains of Agatha’s quiche.
She faces a dilemma; if she says nothing, she’s likely to be regarded as a murder suspect, and if she confesses, she’s exposed as a cheat and will most certainly never be accepted by the villagers as one of their own. The only solution is for Agatha herself to track down the real murderer, against the advice of her new acquaintance, Detective Inspector Bill Wong, who warns her not to meddle in the investigation.
A middle-aged single woman snooping into the goings-on in a pretty chocolate-box village with its idyllic surroundings - the village pub, the W.I. charity events, the general tittle-tattle and gossip, and the vicar’s wife at the hub of everything – it’s a popular and hugely successful formula, and one immediately thinks of Miss Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s elderly heroine and solver of dozens of murders set in cosy English village settings. The similarity ends there, however, with Agatha Raisin possessing a range of vocabulary certain to bring a blush to the cheeks of her prim counterpart, and her unexpected turns of phrase bring a degree of modern day humour to the proceedings. This is a light an easy read, neither the writing style nor the uncomplicated plot will prove unduly taxing, and the absence of graphic description will ensure few nightmares amongst the book’s readers. As long as one doesn’t expect too much in terms of probability and strong characterisation, it should prove an adequately entertaining and pleasant read, particularly over a mug of hot chocolate on a dark, cold winter’s evening.
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