PUSHING UP DAISIES

Agatha Raisin continues to struggle, though not very hard, against her predilection for unsuitable men.

Agatha is a talented private detective whose gut feelings about cases rarely let her down. The same cannot be said about her ever more desperate search for the right man. Her latest amatory interest, Gerald Devere, is a retired Scotland Yard detective whom Agatha’s best friend, Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife, likes well enough to dye her hair and freshen up her wardrobe for. But it’s Agatha’s best male friend and sometime lover, Sir Charles Fraith, who accompanies Agatha to visit obnoxious Lord Bellington, whose plan to sell the village allotments he owns to a developer has the villagers up in arms. Bellington refuses their pleas in no uncertain way, setting the stage for his sudden demise. Agatha’s observation that his death sounds like antifreeze poisoning turns out to be true, much to the annoyance of Inspector Wilkes, who already has reason to dislike her. Bellington’s son Damian hires Agatha’s agency to find his father’s killer even though only his sister Andrea seems to care that their father died. But enough about murder. Agatha’s long-running love/hate relationship with her gorgeous assistant, Toni Gilmour, is complicated by her status as the object of desire for Simon Black, another detective. Neither one is happy when Agatha takes on a good-looking but lazy young man as a trainee. As the bodies start to pile up, Agatha refuses to abandon a case that’s grown almost as complicated as her love life.

Fans of this long-running series will enjoy the continuing drama of the private eye’s romances, which, as so often before (Dishing The Dirt, 2016, etc.), overshadow the mystery.