Agatha Raisin Companion
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Their enforced living arrangements at first drive James and Agatha further apart, but the starchy historian springs a welcome surprise on her at the end of the book.
VICTIMS
Jessica Tartinck: militant leader of the Dembley Walkers and ex-Greenham Common campaigner. Determined to march across the rape field on Sir Charles Fraith’s land, she took umbrage when the charming aristocrat won over the rest of the group and went alone. Killed by a blow to the back of the head with a spade and then buried in a field.
Jeffrey Benson: Jessica’s lover, fellow rambler and former IRA sympathizer. Murdered with a blow to the head as he cut the padlock on a landowner’s gate.
BOOK 5:
Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage
At last, Agatha has her man but life is not all rosy in the garden just yet. As she goes about making her wedding plans, she is fully aware that she never divorced her alcoholic ex, Jimmy Raisin, and has lied to James, telling him that her first husband died of drink years ago. Aware she has no proof that this is the case, and terrified to delay the nuptials in case she loses the love of her life, Agatha opts to get married in the registry office instead of the village church, upsetting her friend, Mrs Bloxby as well as many of the villagers.
In her typically insensitive way, Agatha also manages to upset her young friend Roy, who worked for her in the PR firm she owned and stayed with the company when she sold it. After he is not given credit for his help in one of her murder enquiries, Roy takes offence and, in a fit of pique, hires a private detective to track down the errant ex. As a blissful Agatha prepares to become Mrs Lacey, the wedding is halted by local policeman Fred Griggs, who has met Jimmy in the village and discovered that Agatha is about to commit bigamy. Faced with Jimmy, Agatha screams, ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard,’ in front of the gathered guests. A furious James tells her she has disgraced him and he will never forgive her. Devastated, she pays Jimmy to go away and retires to her empty home to lick her wounds. As dawn breaks the following day, Agatha ventures out, only to be confronted by her drunken ex who she shoves into a ditch, screeching, ‘Why don’t you die?’
When Jimmy is found dead in the same ditch, less than an hour later, Agatha is charged with his murder. Having sold her house, she has nowhere to go until James returns and offers her his spare room. Together they set out to find the real murderer and clear their own names as several more victims fall along the way. And while all roads seem to lead to a Mrs Serena Gore-Appleton, who had attended a health farm with Jimmy, the mysterious lady seems impossible to track down.
VICTIMS
Jimmy Raisin: Agatha’s drunken ex-husband, strangled with his own tie a short time after Agatha’s assault on him.
Janet Purvey: a local spinster, who had attended the health farm at the same time as Jimmy and the elusive Mrs Gore-Appleton. Claimed Jimmy had ‘come on’ to her. Strangled by someone she vaguely recognized as she watched Die Hard in Mircester’s cinema.
Sir Desmond Derrington: married aristocrat who was being blackmailed by Jimmy over the mistress he had taken to the health farm. Shot himself after a visit from Agatha and James as he feared his affair would be exposed to his wife.
Helen Warwick: House of Commons secretary and lover of Sir Desmond. Agatha’s hackles rose when she took a shine to James, but he soon realized she was a gold-digger. Murdered with her own scarf after turning up in Carsely to see James but not finding him at home.
BOOK 6:
Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist
After the aborted nuptials, James has fled to Northern Cyprus and Agatha decides to follow him there. Before she tracks him down, however, she takes a boat trip and meets two parties of holidaymakers – a snooty couple called the Debenhams, with an equally upper-class friend, and the Wilcoxes, a seemingly wealthy, lower-class couple also accompanied by an elderly family friend.
Finally she tracks James down to the villa he rented for their honeymoon, which is in an appalling state. The following day he rents a new villa and, at the suggestion of the locals showing them round, Agatha opts to share with him. At dinner that night, they are press-ganged into joining the group from the boat trip, who have now joined forces, and go on to a nightclub. There, a drunken Rose Wilcox slides under the table and is soon found to have been murdered. Agatha is forced to stay on the island until the murderer is found.
By coincidence, Sir Charles Fraith arrives at the Dome Hotel and takes Agatha out for the evening. Although she is still in love with James, Agatha ends up sleeping with him in his hotel room.
VICTIMS
Rose Wilcox: blowzy British tourist married to self-made businessman Trevor. Sexy and flirty, but clearly hiding her true intelligence under a dumb exterior. Murdered in the nightclub in Cyprus with a long, sharp blade in the back.
Harry Tembleton: older friend of upper-class couple, Olivia and George Debenham. Found by Agatha, dead on the beach with his face covered by a newspaper, having been murdered with a similar weapon to that used on Rose.
BOOK 7:
Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death
A penitent Roy Silver persuades Agatha back into PR, to represent a local mineral water company. They are keen to exploit a natural spring in the village of Ancombe, next to Carsely, but the villagers are divided over the scheme. As the debate rages on, Robert Struthers, the chairman of the parish council, is found dead by the spring. Although he was undecided on the issue, it looks like someone has silenced him before he had a chance to cast the deciding vote. Agatha must now investigate the parish council and solve the murder, while promoting the water company in the wake of a scandal.
Still smarting from her disastrous relationship with James, Agatha dates Guy Freemont, who owns Ancombe Water Company with his brother Peter. Meanwhile, James goes for a radical makeover – dyed-blond hair, three earrings, dirty jeans and boots – to infiltrate an environmental group called Save Our Foxes, determined to carry out his own independent investigation.
VICTIMS
Robert Struthers: chairman of Ancombe Parish Council, and undecided on the issue of the spring. Hit on the head and left lying at the spring, with blood seeping into the water. The body is found by Agatha as she walks to Ancombe one evening.
Robina Toynbee: owner of the spring. Received death threats after selling the water to the company, but dismissed them as crank letters from militant environmentalists. Found hanging upside down from her garden wall, with blood gushing from her head into the spring, during a procession with a marching band organized by Agatha.
BOOK 8:
Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham
With James and Charles away, and Bill on holiday, Agatha is depressed and lonely.
Following the horrifying discovery of grey hairs, she attempts to tint her hair and instead turns it purple. On Mrs Bloxby’s recommendation, she seeks help from a talented hairdresser called Mr John, who has a salon in Evesham. Flattered by the good-looking crimper, she agrees to a date, but when she sees the frightened face of a lady they bump into in the restaurant, she becomes suspicious of her new admirer. In an attempt to discover whether he is a blackmailer, she has dinner with him again and begins to fall for his charms. While she is on a visit to his salon, however, he begins to vomit and dies.
Unwilling to drop the case, Agatha decides to break into his house to find out what he was hiding but, while she searches in the basement, the building is set alight and she narrowly escapes through a window. But who wanted the popular hairdresser dead?
VICTIMS
John Shawpart: the Wizard of Evesham. Brilliant and attractive hairdresser who preyed on vulnerable women using flattery and then blackmail. Poisoned by a ricin injection in a vitamin capsule.
Mrs Darry: Carsely villager and incorrigible gossip who was detested by Agatha. Had been blackmailed by John over tax evasion and later killed with a poker in her own home. The body was found by Agatha and Charles alongside the corpse of her dog.
BOOK 9:
&n
bsp; Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden
After a run-in with a psychopathic hairdresser, who used depilatory cream on her glossy brown hair rather than conditioner, Agatha flees to the seaside town of Wyckhadden to allow it grow back away from the gaze of the villagers and, particularly, James Lacey. There she meets local police chief Jimmy Jessop, a widower, and a romance develops.
In an effort to help her hair grow back, she visits the resident witch, who gives her a restorative lotion as well as a love potion. But after her prized fur coat is vandalized at the hotel, Agatha suspects the witch and returns to confront her, only to find her dead in a pool of blood. Forced to stay in the town, she slips a love potion into Jimmy’s drink and ends up sleeping with him. He asks her to marry him and she accepts, all the while imagining the effect her engagement will have on James.
She also slips some of the potion into the drink of a retired colonel, resident at the hotel, hoping he will fall for a lovesick fellow guest. When he dies from natural causes, the distraught admirer throws herself from a window.
When Sir Charles Fraith arrives on the scene, an upset Agatha welcomes him with open arms – and ends up sleeping with him too. James Lacey also turns up at the hotel, at the same time as Jimmy walks in on his new fiancée, still in bed with Charles.
VICTIMS
Francie Juddle, the Witch of Wyckhadden: beaten to death with a large, heavy object in her own bed. Found by Agatha after supplying her with a lotion to make her hair grow.
Janine Juddle: Francie’s daughter who arrives in Wyckhadden with her husband and takes over her mother’s business. Drowns after arranging a seance attended by most of the residents of the Garden Hotel, where Agatha is staying. Professes to have conjured up the ghost of Jimmy Raisin but Agatha catches her out. Found by the residents floating in the sea shortly afterwards.
BOOK 10:
Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam
Following the ill-advised liaison with Charles, Jimmy Jessop has found a new bride and James Lacey has once more fled Carsely, leaving Agatha alone again. Sick of the Cotswolds and her roller coaster of emotions, she consults a fortune teller who assures her that her destiny lies in Norfolk. She immediately puts her house up for sale and rents a cottage in the Norfolk village of Fryfam, picked by sticking a pin in a map.
After taking against a couple who come to view the house, she changes her mind about selling, but decides to spend some time in Norfolk anyway. Ensconced in Lavender Cottage with her cats, amid a local population of rude villagers with archaic views on women, Agatha decides to try her hand at writing a detective novel.
Every evening, however, she is disturbed by tiny lights flickering at the bottom of her garden, which the more superstitious locals believe to be fairies. When objects begin to go missing from her house, Agatha wonders if the villagers are playing tricks on her. But events take a sinister turn when a valuable Stubbs is stolen from the lord of the manor, who is later murdered. With the help of Charles, who turns up at the cottage unannounced, Agatha uncovers a seam of blackmail, adultery and jealousy in the close-knit community.
Meanwhile, in Carsely, James is being pursued by another attractive divorcée – but is he pining for Agatha?
VICTIMS
Terence ‘Tolly’ Trumpington-James: self-styled lord of the manor who made his money from installing showers. After his priceless painting disappears, he is found at his huge stately home, with his throat slit.
Paul Redfern: gruff, aggressive gamekeeper at the manor. His head is blown off with a shotgun in his grace-and-favour cottage. His body is discovered by Sir Charles and Agatha when they turn up to question him about Tolly’s death.
BOOK 11.
Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell
The life that Agatha dreamed of has turned into a nightmare. Now married to the love of her life, she is trapped in a ‘fog of masculine disapproval’. James criticizes everything she does and, as soon as the honeymoon is over, he turns into a control freak, constantly telling her what to wear and do. When she decides to take a PR job for a local shoe firm, James is furious, but she presses ahead anyway.
Finding him in a pub with divorcée Melissa Sheppard, Agatha flies into a jealous rage, but when Sir Charles comes to visit her in her own cottage, James assumes she is the one who is cheating. In the meantime, James has confided in Mrs Bloxby that he has a brain tumour but doesn’t want to tell his new wife. After their reconciliation, Agatha learns the truth about his illness from Melissa but, before she can confront him, he disappears, leaving behind signs of a violent struggle in his house. Agatha is suspected of his murder until the discovery of his lover’s body turns the suspicion on to him.
With Charles’s help, Agatha must find her missing husband and clear both their names. She soon discovers Melissa’s two ex-husbands, a love rival and a jealous sister – all with a motive for murder.
VICTIM
Melissa Sheppard, two-time divorcée and lover of James. Her head is bashed in at her kitchen table and the fly-infested body is found nearly two days later by Agatha and Charles.
BOOK 12:
The Day the Floods Came
Agatha is once more abandoned, with James having fled to live in a monastery and Charles settling down, at last, with a French girl in Paris. She takes a break on Robinson Crusoe Island in South America, where she meets a group of people, including a newly-wed couple who make her feel uneasy.
On her return home, she learns that the bride drowned shortly after, and she suspects the young groom of pushing her in the sea. A few months later, the Avon floods its banks and Agatha, standing on a bridge in Evesham, spots the body of a bride-to-be floating in the swollen river. Police rule it a suicide, but convinced that it was the bridegroom, yet again, she sets about solving the case. As the police have warned her off, she invests in a wig and poses as a TV producer researching a programme.
In Carsely, James’s cottage is sold to a crime writer named John Armitage who happens to be single and extremely attractive. He begins to help Agatha with her investigation.
VICTIMS
Concita Ramon: newlywed who was spending her honeymoon on Robinson Crusoe Island. Not being able to swim, she drowned on a boat trip and husband Pablo claimed she fell in. He was spotted pushing his heavily insured bride into the sea.
Kylie Stokes: admin clerk and bride-to-be. Drowned in the flood water after being pumped full of drugs. Agatha suspects her fiancé, who runs a club with his dad, but police believe it is a suicide.
Mrs Anstruther-Jones: Carsely villager and member of the Ladies’ Society. Killed by a hit and run driver in Evesham after borrowing Agatha’s wig and glasses for a secret liaison with a married man. Mistaken for Agatha by the killer.
Joanna Field: colleague of Kylie who takes a shine to John and agrees to help them. Smacked on the back of the head as she looks through Kylie’s emails, but survives. Later she goes missing and is found with her neck broken in an old freezer room behind the nightclub.
BOOK 13:
Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate
Agatha discovers that ex-husband James has left the monastery without taking holy orders, leaving her feeling even more rejected. Still smarting from John Armitage’s ungallant proposition, she falls hook, line and sinker for the beautiful young curate, Tristan. She is thrilled when he invites her for dinner in his digs, but on the same night he is stabbed at the vicarage and dies, apparently while raiding the collection box.
Along with John Armitage, Agatha investigates at his old parish, New Cross, where they discover he was gay and that he had conned a donation of £10,000 from philanthropic tycoon Richard Binser for a fictional boys’ club.
It seems the curate was not the quite the golden boy he appeared to be.
VICTIMS
Tristan Delon: blond-haired, blue-eyed and beautiful, he has the ladies of the parish eating out of his hand. Stabbed to death in the vicar’s study, with the vicar’s letter-opener, in the middle of the night. Fou
nd by Mrs Bloxby in the morning.
Miss Jellop: thin, middle-aged Carsely resident and member of the Ladies’ Society who Tristan had been spending time with. Strangled in her home and discovered, once again, by the vicar’s wife as she called round.
Peggy Slither: another middle-aged lady who Tristan wooed with an eye to getting his hands on her money. Stabbed to death in a gory murder in her Ancombe home. This time the body was found by Agatha.
BOOK 14:
Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House
With no murders on the horizon, Agatha gets involved in investigating a haunted house at the behest of her new neighbour, the attractive Paul Chatterton. She proves fairly inept at dealing with the supernatural, as the sight of the old lady who lives there, wearing a facepack, sends her screaming from the house.
But old Mrs Witherspoon is murdered soon after their visit. Her son is the prime suspect and Agatha and Paul are asked to prove him innocent. They discover a secret tunnel to Mrs Witherspoon’s house and a priceless manuscript hidden in a hole up a vent, which they decide to keep from the police.