If there is a noir with which to fill the beaches and swimming pools, it is MC Beaton. While multitudes of popular musicians struggle to come up with the song of the summer every year, the ineffable MC Beaton invented this black gender summer good decades ago. Nothing more and nothing less than since the 80s in which this pseudonym came to life.
Undoubtedly, Marion Gibbons linked her alias to a thousand wonders with a literature made to be read lightly but with great intelligence, humor, narrative self-confidence and hook to have to read each of her deliveries in one go. Like the songs of summer, the novels covered by the MC Beaton label resonate with the cadence of a catchy chorus. A fascinating facility to compose stories consistent in substance and form, stripped of plot devices and great in its simplicity.
The simple fact of "amputating" the pseudonym of its final author in this entry points to a versatility that in the case of Gibbons reaches a more complete meaning. Let's discover Beaton and one of her most iconic characters from her extensive series: Agatha Raisin.
Top 3 Recommended MC Beaton Novels
Agatha Raisin and the lethal quiche
The coincidences that end up unleashing the imprint of the hero or heroine. Agatha Raisin had that birth of suspense around crime from the most unexpected chance. A more than evident tribute to Agatha Christie and his Miss Marple. Only that, as a good outstanding student, we find in Beaton's presentations a more profiled researcher. A police trainee propped up in necessary extremes such as scratchy humor with parody, when she is not satire pointing to the peculiarities of rural England, and an even more morbid touch in the modus operandi of the crime to be discovered.
Agatha Raisin wraps her head around her blanket and decides to leave London to savor the joys of early retirement in a sleepy Cotswolds village, where she soon becomes bored as an oyster. To display her talent for haute cuisine at her parish cooking competition would have to make her, perforce, a celebrity. However, at the first bite of her exquisite quiche, the contest judge collapses and she Agatha is forced to confess her bitter truth: the deadly quiche was bought. There is only one solution for her to be forgiven: get involved in flour and unmask the murderer herself.
Agatha Raisin and the death ride
Fourth installment of the series. A novel where we already know Agatha Raisin perfectly and where her magnetism to enter directly into the narrowest circle of crime leads us to considerations about whether the bad guys are looking for her as a challenge for her misdeeds... https: //amzn.to /3zeLgoL
After a long stint in London, Agatha Raisin returns to her beloved town of Carsely and to her desired James Lacey, the handsome retired colonel who doesn't seem exactly thrilled to have his neighbor back. However, Agatha barely has time to come up with new conquest strategies when a gruesome murder occurs. The victim is the young and spirited Jessica Tartinck, a conflictive leader of a group of hikers confronted by the smug local landowners by claiming the right of way for the members of the association through her land.
Posing as husband and wife, James and Agatha infiltrate Jessica's walking group, and as their schedule fills with suspects, they discover that many of the victim's associates seem all too capable of murder. But Agatha's happiness is short-lived, and her sham marriage to James is not at all what she expected.
Agatha Raisin and the cruel vet
There is a quixotic point in the figure of Agatha Raisin. Her adventures and misadventures have that distant romantic/impossible point of a possible love that hovers between fiction and reality. What is clear is that in her way of undoing various wrongs and crimes of hers, we enjoy her with an intensity for everything that always places her in the eye of the hurricane of the most intense passions.
Having unmasked the killer of the lethal quiche, fortune seems to smile on Agatha Raisin. Accepted by the picturesque community of Carsely, and happily accompanied by her two cats, her life goes by with no other goal than to break the indifference of James Lacey, a retired military man for whom Agatha feels true devotion.
An interest that seems to evaporate when Paul Bladen appears on the scene, the new village veterinarian, who is not oblivious to her charms. However, the man succumbs to an injection intended for a racehorse, and although everything points to an accident, Agatha believes it to be a crime. To the surprise of the locals, Colonel Lacey shares, for once, the hypothesis of her tenacious neighbor, to the point of embarking with her on an investigation much more dangerous than both could have imagined.
Other recommended books by MC Beaton
Agatha Raisin and the spring of death
Seventh installment that maintains the freshness and capacity for surprise sprinkled with humor and the occasional murderer with more or less skill and more or less treachery... Laugh at the crime while allowing ourselves to be guided by a juicy investigation. All in one.
Agatha Raisin returns to her cottage in the Cotswolds depressed and apathetic. To overcome her frustration, she tries to distract herself at the Carsely Ladies' Association, where she finds a heated debate about the proposal that the newly founded Anscombe Water Company has made to the town's Parish Council to bottle and market water from a local spring.
However, the decision is complicated when Agatha discovers the body of the company president right under the fountain. And while all kinds of speculations are unleashed, the incombustible Agatha accepts the company's public relations position with the mission of offering an edifying image of the company and, in the process, clarifying the mysterious death of Mr. Struthers.
