Book Review: Agatha Raisin and the Busy body - M.C. Beaton

Agatha Raisin serie - Book 21

I don't think I will ever grow tired of Agatha! yes, probably the books now are a tiny bit predictable as it is our Agatha, and yet I still find reading her misadventures very enjoyable and it is like coming back home a bit/
In the busy body there is a double murder in a nearby village and the possible culprits are so many, most likely the entire village as they all loathed the Health inspector that was murdered.
Between the events and Agatha solving the crime, a year goes by and we encounter a new character, a young trainee detective that spices things up a bit, while Agatha is still her true self and cannot help herself in seeing love in every man she comes across.

Overall rating:  6,5    Plot: 6,5   Writing style: 6,5   Cover:  6,5

Title: Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body

Author: M.C. Beaton
Publisher: Constable
Pages: 244
Publication year: 2010

The Plot:

Cranky yet lovable Agatha Raisin has always been ambivalent about holiday cheer, though her cozy village of Carsely has long prided itself on its Christmas festivities. Until now. This year, local Health and Safety Board officer John Sunday is threatening to undo some of Carsley’s most time-honored traditions. The tree on top of the church? A public menace. The decorations hanging on the lampposts? Hazardous. Even May Dimwoody’s homemade toys are deemed unsafe for the children. Bah humbug! The Carsely Ladies Society is in an uproar and will do anything to put a stop to this Scrooge—only to find that someone else has done it for them…with a kitchen knife. Soon Agatha’s detective agency is on the case. But when a man has made as many enemies as Mr. John Sunday, it’s hard to know where to start—or how to stop the killer from striking again.

The Author:

M.C. Beaton was born in Glasgow, Scotland. She started her first job as a bookseller in charge of the fiction department at John Smith & Sons Ltd. While bookselling, by chance, she received an offer from the Scottish Daily Mail to review variety shows and quickly rose to become their theatre critic. She left Smith’s to join Scottish Field magazine as a secretary in the advertising department, without any shorthand or typing experience, but quickly got the job of fashion editor instead. She then moved to the Scottish Daily Express where she reported mostly on crime. This was followed by a move to Fleet Street to the Daily Express where she became chief woman reporter.After marrying Harry Scott Gibbons and having a son, Charles, Marion moved to the United States where Harry had been offered the position of editor of the Oyster Bay Guardian. They subsequently moved to Virginia and Marion worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon in Alexandria while Harry washed the dishes. Both then got jobs at Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, The Star, and moved to New York. Anxious to spend more time at home with her small son, Marion, supported by her husband, started to write Regency romances. After she had written close to 100, and had gotten fed up with the 1811 to 1820 period, she began to write detective stories under the pseudonym of M. C. Beaton. On a trip from the States to Sutherland on holiday, a course at a fishing school inspired the first Hamish Macbeth story. Marion and Harry returned to Britain and bought a croft house in Sutherland where Harry reared a flock of black sheep. When her son graduated, and both of his parents tired of the long commute to the north of Scotland, they moved to the Cotswolds, where Agatha Raisin was created. While Marion wrote her historical romances under her maiden name, Marion Chesney, as well as several pseudonyms (Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, and Charlotte Ward), because of her great success with mystery novels as M. C. Beaton, most of her publishers both in the U.S. and abroad use the M. C. Beaton pseudonym for all of her novels.