I read the first 5 books in the Agatha Raisin series as a stress reliever during a busy summer. I liked them, but I didn’t love them. I read 6-10 (and actually I’m up to 12, now) out of ennui, because they’re always available from the library and they’re easy listening for my frequent long car trips. Six through 10 were not as enjoyable as the first five, unfortunately. Books 6-10 see Agatha leave her small village in the Cotswolds and do some traveling (which […]
Cozy Cotswolds
Wow, it feels like forever since I posted a review. We bought a house last month and everything else has been on hold while we moved and settled in. In that time, I discovered Agatha Raisin and found that she was perfect for stressful times of life. The Agatha Raisin series is about a middle-aged woman, Agatha, who retires from her high-powered job in London for a quiet life in the Cotswolds. Unfortunately, chaos and murder seems to follow her and she finds herself mixed […]
A rare instance of good fun in book and tv form
Thank goodness for cozy mysteries. I was in need of something light and fluffy to get the taste of previous blech reading out of my head, and this did the trick. I had accidentally recorded the tv version of Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death a while back, and really liked it, so I picked up the original novel. I was not disappointed. The basic premise is that Agatha, the owner of a successful PR firm, moves to a small countryside village because of […]
Midsomer Marple gets down with her bad self
Year of Crime Book 2 So, here we are. 2015 will be the year I finally burn through the rest of the Agatha Raisin books, which have been sitting on my Kindle for a year. The self-imposed Year of Crime (Reading) should sort that right out. And following the entertaining but hugely miscast TV adaptation of the first book, my interest in all things Raisin has been very much renewed. So, after several years of having her retirement disrupted by dead bodies popping up and […]
Midsomer Marple tries her hand at ghostbusting
The other day, I looked at my “Already on the Kindle” shelf over on Goodreads and I thought to myself “you know, I have a LOT of crime books here. Like a LOT”. So I decided, there and then, to make 2015 my Year of Crime. While I’m not going to devote myself solely to reading crime novels, they will make up the majority of my Cannonball 7 input. The plan originally was to end Cannonball 6 with Station Eleven, but it was so good I burned […]
Midsomer Marple & The Dead Religious Guy
Continuing my brain dead decompression from the lengthy Booker challenge finds me reading the 13th instalment of the Agatha Raisin books. At the start of the year, for a brief window, the entire series (apart from the recently published latest instalment, the brilliantly titled Something Borrowed, Someone Dead. I’m going to just go ahead and say the death in that one is wedding related), was just 84p a piece on Kindle. So I bought them all. They are the perfect palate cleansers in between bigger and better […]