Agatha Raisin finds herself still at loose ends and needs one more vacation to get away from her failed marriage and love affairs. She sees mystery in everything and in fact guesses at a murder that hasn't happen yet. Agatha is actually turning into a good detective and her courage and abilities prompt a former skeptic to consider urging her to go professional. Unfortuantely her low self-esteem gets in her way both personally and with her cases once more almost resulting in another murder - her own.
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The review of this Book prepared by Eileen Regan
St. Martin's, July 2002, 22.95, 224 pp.
ISBN 03122076070
Agatha Raisin is in a deep funk. The man she loved, cherished after and finally married is divorcing her to become a monk in a French monastery. Her good friend Sir Charles is no longer available to keep her company because he married a French woman who is pregnant with twins. Her spirits are lifted when she finds the body of a bride in a wedding gown floating down the river.
She decides that since the police ruled the case a homicide she would solve it before the authorities do. Helping her is her new neighbor, crime writer John Armitage. While interviewing individuals connected to the victim, Agatha discovers the dead woman was a cunning, cold and manipulative person who was black mailing some people. While trying to figure out who that someone is, two attempts are made on her life before she finally figures it out and by then it is almost too late.
Agatha Raisin, a cranky, crude and raunchy woman somehow (and this reviewer doesn't have a clue) manages to warm her way into the reader's heart and elicit their sympathy. The latest installment in this long running series is funny, breezy and very enjoyable. Though the heroine has not changed an iota from the first tale, M.C. Beaton has written another winner.
Harriet Klausner
The review of this Book prepared by Harriet Klausner