Excerpt from The Quiche of Death

I hope you picked up a few good books with promo this weekend! Stay tuned for a Valentine’s Day post. (Yes, Valentine’s Day is coming, if that means you need to buy anything or make any special reservations.)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I have read several of M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series, but I have not read the first one. And here it is, The Quiche of Death. Agatha retires from her advertising agency and moved to the Cotswolds, fulfilling a childhood dream. Only she finds out she doesn’t like it that much, or the people there don’t like her that much, and she decides to make a splash by winning a cooking prize at the county fair. But she can’t cook. And that’s just the beginning.

By the time she reached Paddington Station, she had walked herself into a more optimistic frame of mind. She had chosen her new life and she would make it work. That village was going to sit up and take notice of Agatha Raisin. 

M.C. Beaton, The Quiche of Death

Putting all her eggs in one basket, Agatha Raisin gives up her successful PR firm, sells her London flat, and samples a taste of early retirement in the quiet village of Carsely. Bored, lonely and used to getting her way, she enters a local baking contest: Surely a blue ribbon for the best quiche will make her the toast of the town. But her recipe for social advancement sours when Judge Cummings-Browne not only snubs her entry—but falls over dead! After her quiche’s secret ingredient turns out to be poison, she must reveal the unsavory truth…

Agatha has never baked a thing in her life! In fact, she bought her entry ready-made from an upper crust London quicherie. Grating on the nerves of several Carsely residents, she is soon receiving sinister notes. Has her cheating and meddling landed her in hot water, or are the threats related to the suspicious death? It may mean the difference between egg on her face and a coroner’s tag on her toe…