Will I love The Quiche of Death?

I love a woman who’s hard to love.

Tough, even prickly on the outside, but with hidden softness that leads her to unexpected places. She doesn’t know herself well and often stumbles over her own stubbornness…until she embraces vulnerability and accepts herself as she is.

That’s Agatha Raisin right down to the ground. Clearly intelligent, highly motivated, dedicatedly independent, strong to her core, yet when she strikes out on a new life path, she fumbles nearly everything and has to learn the hard way how to start over. 

There is humor in her journey, too, keeping things light even when… show more.

I love every one of M. C. Beaton’s books, including her witty, wry humor and observations of an abusive ex-husband and her move to a small village. I love her flaws and that she is an unapologetic smoker and has two cats she loves. I love that she is relatable with a hardscrabble life, coming from an impoverished childhood and finally making it. Albeit with all the insecurities that come from her past. Every book is a treat. 

It takes guts to write a protagonist who’s hard to like. Agatha Raisin, a tough businesswoman who retires to the tiny village of Carsley, is so beautifully flawed she’s impossible to ignore. She’s somewhat of a bully, prone to conniving, and deeply competitive, which is why she buys her quiche at a shop and enters it as her own creation. Of course, someone drops dead after eating it. This crusty woman of a certain age just bulldozes her way through the investigation and her flaws are so funny and refreshing that you wind up rooting for her. She’s a breath… show more.

I’ve been an M. C. Beaton fan since forever and realized that a cozy mystery doesn’t need to be trite and treacly. They can be tart, saucy, sarcastic, and cuttingly funny. Agatha Raisin’s debut misadventure is a good place to start.

Agatha, a London PR exec, has a chip on her shoulder the size of Surrey. But when she retires to the Cotswolds, she wants to fit in and make local connections. Why not enter a quiche in the local baking contest? (A store-bought quiche, in fact—typical Agatha.) A judge samples it and drops dead. Many a chuckle and hoot… show more.

The Agatha Raisin series features a 52-year-old successful PR executive who retires to a small country village in England. Agatha is a force of nature, she’s irascible, difficult, and determined but utterly endearing. She’s not averse to cheating either and it’s when she passes off a quiche as her own in a village contest (the quiche turns out to be poisoned) – Agatha is the prime suspect. The situations Agatha gets into are very much like I Love Lucy.