M. C Beaton

"Hamish's new constable, Dorothy McIver, may be the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Completely bewitched by her sparkling blue eyes, Hamish spends the summer traveling with her up and down Sutherland until finally, he can take it no longer. He gets down on one knee beside the Land Rover and begs her to marry him-and to his amazement and delight, she says yes. But just as the town of Lochdubh gets ready to celebrate, Hamish finds himself with...

Beloved New York Times bestseller M.C. Beaton's cranky, crafty Agatha Raisin—the star of her own hit T.V. series—is back on the case again in Devil's Delight.
Agatha and her assistant, Toni, are driving to their friend Bill Wong's long-awaited wedding, thinking of nothing more than what the beautiful bride will be wearing when a terrified young man comes running down the country lane towards them wearing...nothing

...

"When private detective Agatha Raisin comes across a severed leg in a roadside hedge, it looks like she is about to become involved in a particularly gruesome murder. Looks, however, can be deceiving, as Agatha discovers when she is employed to investigate a case of industrial espionage at a factory where nothing is quite what it seems. The factory mystery soon turns to murder and a bad-tempered donkey turns Agatha into a national celebrity, before...

Lady Fortescue and Colonel Sandhurst hatch a plan: What if they were to transform her decrepit home into a posh hotel, offering their guests the pleasure of being waited upon by nobility? With the help of other down-and-out aristocrats, they do just that, and the Poor Relation is born.

When Agatha Raisin learns that her friend and one-time lover Charles Fraith is to be married to socialite, Miss Mary Brown-Field, she sees it as her duty to find out what she can about the woman. Out of selfless concern for Charles, of course. When Agatha crashes their wedding, it ends in a public altercation. There's a scream from the stable-- and now Agatha and Charles are suspects in a murder. Clues lead to the competitive equestrian world, in...

A retired businesswoman solves a mystery.

Even though Agatha Raisin loathes amateur dramatics, her friend, the vicar's wife, has persuaded her to support the local pantomime. Stifling a yawn at the production of "Babes in the Woods," Agatha watches the baker playing an ogre strut and threaten on the stage, until a trapdoor opens and the Ogre disappears in an impressive puff of smoke. Only he doesn't re-appear at the final curtain. Surely this isn't the way the scene was rehearsed. . .

Crankier than ever, Agatha Raisin wants to forget that her husband left her to enter a monastery—a turn of affairs more humiliating than when she caught him with a mistress. She feels abandoned, fat, frumpy, and absolutely furious.

What are her options? She takes an island vacation and joins a Pilates class. But what finally lifts her spirits is finding a corpse. The dead girl was a member of Agatha's exercise class, afloat in a rain-swollen

...

A retired businesswoman solves a mystery.

Mrs. Gillespie is famous for being the best maid in the northwest of Sutherland. But to Hamish Macbeth, she is a malicious gossip who bangs around the furniture and clanks pots. When Hamish wins Mrs. Gillespie's services in a church raffle, he spends most of the day trying to avoid her. He doesn't understand how she managed to gain such a fine reputation. Then she is found dead, struck down violently by a metal bucket of water. Knowing Mrs. Gillespie's...