Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham - MC Beaton (1999)

I really hate being disappointed in a book. Not that I don't get annoyed at a disappointing movie or album or whatever, but there's something particularly unexpected and irksome about a poor book from a trusted writer. Note - not a disaster from a favourite writer; that'd be a cause for real concern, not my current feeling of vague irritation. Don't get me wrong, this is not John Irving's descent from the majesty of A Prayer for Owen Meaney to that dull one about tattooists (or, on a muscial note, Bowie managing to go from Scary Monsters to Never Let me Down in a few short years), but still I found myself turning each page with an almost audible grunt of dissatisfaction and a sense of being very ineptly mugged.

It'd be too tiresome to go into some sort of line by line breakdown of what's wrong with this book (and besides, it's fairly clear no editor ever bothered such an analysis prior to publication, so why should I?), but it'd be facile to just shrug and say 'it didn't work for me' when there is actual stuff which can be pointed at accusingly.

It's not very well written but anyone coming to one of Beaton's cosy mysteries expecting scintillating dialogue and subtle characterisation is in for a nasty shock. As with all the other Agatha Raisin mysteries, every character uses the exact same voice, the heroine and her coterie of friends and admirers are so sketchily, well sketched, that were it not for someone occasionally baldly stating their ages the reader would struggle to pin them down to within a couple of decades. At times even that doesn't really help much - Agatha herself is at times described as a pensioner and middle-aged and jumps in and out of bed with the gay abandon of a teenager, while I still have no idea what age her occasional paramour, Charles, is supposed to be.

More importantly though, the actual solution to the mystery is both extremely obvious from the very beginning and, crucially and disappointingly, is solved by Charles taking 'a lucky guess' and thus discovering the murderer. Throw in a small village in which - because it suits the plot - there lives a sound engineer who can also set up bugs on people, about fifty unhappily married and easily seduced women and a seeming innocent who just happens to have connections in the Glasgow underworld...oh never mind. I can already feeling myself considering looking up a few examples of utter stupidity and I said I wasn't going to do that.

Suffice to say that usually Beaton turns out uninspired but comfortingly cosy mysteries - this, however, falls well below even that standard.

Like Agatha and any of her tediously uncaring lovers I'm horribly disappointed...

The Lady Grace Mysteries: Assassin - Patricia Finney (writing as Gravce Cavendish)

Wikipedia has pages for high school basketball players, extinct types of wheat, obscure politicians best known for sending smutty texts to young men and radio stations in Missouri. Until last year, it didn't have a page for the author Patricia Finney.

I'm pretty sure that says something both about the relative usefulness of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and the general foolishness of its editors.

For Patricia Finney is the author of one of the best Elizabethan spy series (starring David Becket and Simon Ames and running for three volumes to date - Firedrake's Eye (1992), Unicorn's Blood (1998) and Gloriana's Torch (2003)) plus an equally intelligent series about Sir Robert Carey, set a little earlier and now up to five volumes, with the publication of A Murder of Crows earlier this year.

The latter series is written under the nom de plume of PF Chisholm (possibly because the first was submitted for publication when the author was 18 and freshly enrolled at Oxford University as an undergraduate), which perhaps explains the lack of Wiki page to some extent.

The Lady Grace Mysteries - a series of short mystery novels for younger readers set at the court of Elizabeth I - are also pseudonymously written, this time as Lady Grace Cavendish herself, the heroine of the novels. It's a nice idea, but sadly not one which goes any further than that. Unlike George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, say, there's no attempt other than in author name to pretend that these are genuine history, even though the books are written in the first person, as a series of diary entries in Lade Grace's daybook.

Still, Lady Grace and her friends and enemies are quickly and effectively sketched in - Masou the little Muslim tumbler is perhaps the most interesting of the supporting characters, but most importantly Elizabeth herself feels real and if she has been given a personality not entirely in keeping with the popular historical profile, she's none the worse for the addition of a little unexpected compassion, mischievousness and sense of humour.

The story itself is neatly constructed, as expected, though obviously not as complex as one of Finney's adult novels. It's perhaps rather too linear a plot for an adult mystery fan and in light of the fairly small cast the eventual villain is pretty obvious from the start, but there was enough in Grace's quest to save her fiancé from execution to keep me intrigued for the novel's short length.

For anyone looking for an Elizabethan Smiley's People, this isn't the place to start - Martin Stephen's Henry Gresham series might be better suited, incidentally - but for a leisurely hour or so in a comfy chair, this is just about the right size.