I included this book in my Christmas Mystery TBR pile. You can see why with the title and the cover giving clear yuletide signals. The blurb indicates Agatha is in the midst of Christmas-day-dinner planning and even hints that a case could threaten her festive schedule. Yet having now read the mystery, I won’t be adding it to my Epic List of Christmas Mysteries. Why? Well for a kick off the majority of the plot takes place during October and November, and the Christmas element is tacked on to the end of the book, to give the reader 50 more pages to read. Compared to the other Christmas mysteries I have read this month, the main action of the story does not take place near enough to Christmas, and nor does Christmas as a celebration become involved in the mystery itself. There is no stolen item hidden inside a Christmas present in plain sight. No one is poisoned by a Christmas pudding and there is no corpse found out in the snow or under the Christmas tree. Consequently, the Christmas themed title and cover are somewhat misleading. So, whilst we don’t have a Christmas mystery on our hands, let’s look at what we do have…
Synopsis
‘During the dark, grey days of early December Agatha is obsessed by two things – the looming festivities, and her ex, James Lacey. In order to drive the latter from her thoughts, Agatha concentrates on planning the perfect Christmas for her friends. Even the murder of a Mrs Tamworthy, poisoned with hemlock, does little to distract her and yet it should, as Mrs Tamworthy had written to Agatha, telling her that one of her family wanted to see her dead before the year was out. So slightly guiltily (and belatedly), Agatha sets out to solve the case before the 25th rolls around . . .’
Overall Thoughts
This is the 18th Agatha Raisin mystery and despite it being October, Agatha is already looking ahead to Christmas, placing a high value on the social and aesthetic aspects, as a means for taking her mind off her work (dull) and her love life (awkward). She is dismissive of Phyllis Tamworthy’s letter reporting that someone is trying to kill her, assuming she is a crank.
Animal lovers might not be too enamoured with this early conversation Agatha has with one of her employees:
“[…] How are our profits?”
“Good,” said Mrs Freeman. “It is amazing how grateful people are to get one of their pets back.”
“I miss Harry,” sighed Agatha. “Phil and Patrick don’t mind the divorces, but they do hate searching for animals. They think it is beneath them, and I think it’s beneath me.”
It seems a little unkind given that Agatha has cats of her own. The result of this chat is that Agatha advertises for a young trainee to take over this part of the agency. This turns out to be Toni Gilmour and she soon shows her potential as a private detective. It is with her employees that Agatha’s kind and generous side comes out and Toni’s life in particular, is completely turned around, once she enters Agatha’s employment.
The vicar’s wife also gains some brownie points as she brings Agatha a selection of green penguin crime novels, which were left over from the church sale. Trust me if I had been at that sale there would not have been any left lol It is through reading some of these books (Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin and Freeman Wills Crofts are mentioned) that Agatha reappraises Phyllis’ letter:
‘It was that odd letter from Mrs Tamworthy. Agatha, her mind full of detective stories, reread the letter with new eyes. What if the threat to this woman were real? Perhaps she would be invited to stay. Mrs Tamworthy would be an elegant silver-haired aristocratic lady. she would have a plump, pompous son with a bitchy wife. Her daughter would be the gruff, hunting sort who had never married. She would have one fey granddaughter, very beautiful, engaged to an actor; and another granddaughter, a straightforward no-nonsense girl who was secretly in love with the actor –’
Suffice to say Phyllis Tamworthy’s family do not quite live up to this prediction…
It is, however, no surprise that someone wants to bump Phyllis off, as she has a knack for upsetting people. She is a wealthy woman who is planning to sell her estate and put the funds into building a technical college, cutting her children from her will. Alas though she is letting her offspring know about this decision at her birthday party, with the intention to change the will afterwards. We all know she won’t get the chance to do that… I think Phyllis shares some of Mrs Boynton’s unpleasant qualities, from Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death (1938). This idea was reinforced for me by a comment made at the end of the novel: ‘They’ll never get rid of the dreadful Phyllis, thought Agatha, as she made her way up to her office. She put them all in an emotional prison and they don’t even want to get out.’
Hereon in I would say the plot and the characters run along predictable lines. The plot overall feels like it is being padded out. For example, the narrative forces into the storyline a secret witchcraft organisation, yet the purpose of doing so seems nebulous and uninteresting. It has no relevance to the main plot and Toni peeping at a bunch of naked grownups in the woods is dull rather than comic. There is more than one attack on Agatha’s operatives, which rather than adding drama, just seem to be one more thing to stretch the book out, delaying proper investigative work.
As the novel progresses a disturbing note is introduced and not by the naked people in the woods. It involves Toni, who is 17, and one of the suspects in the case, a man in his 30’s. You spend a lot of the book hoping that the pair do not become romantically involved and it is hard to see which way the plot will jump. Agatha has similar reservations (although mainly because she doesn’t want to lose Toni as an employee) unlike some of the series male characters in the story who try to “normalise” the age difference, but just end up injecting a vein of sleaze to the text. The “sleaze factor” is further augmented with some formulaically written gender double standards for good measure. Again, Agatha does not condone these, but I didn’t really feel like they were fully challenged. The purpose might have been to create some sympathy for Agatha, as Toni herself falls foul of ageism, thinking that Agatha should be past the age of wanting to look sexy.
The case is solved 50(ish) pages from the end, and I was therefore wondering what the book would cover next. As I mentioned earlier, the last fifth of the book focuses on Christmas day but ultimately this final section drags into April of the following year. The only bit of this waffle worth reading involves the fake snow machine.
Agatha Raisin’s solving of the case is achieved through a lightning bolt of inspiration and the usual uninspiring trap set to catch the killer. It occurred to me that there was so much extraneous material and subplots in this book, because the main mystery is not particularly interesting or unusual. Everything felt run-of-the-mill.
I guess if you are already a fan of the series then you will enjoy finding out what happens next in the lives of the series characters, but I don’t feel I can really recommend it as a mystery or as a Christmas story.
Rating: 3.25/5