Kissing Christmas Goodbye

An Agatha Raisin Mystery

By: M. C. Beaton

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Unlike quite a number of people, Agatha has not given up on Christmas. To have the perfect Christmas had been a childhood dream while surviving a rough upbringing in a Birmingham slum. Holly berries glistened, snow fell gently outside, and inside, all was Dickensian jollity. And in her dreams, James Lacey kissed her under the mistletoe, and like a middle-aged sleeping beauty, she would awake to passion once more....

Agatha Raisin is bored. Her detective agency in the Cotswolds is thriving, but she'll scream if she has to deal with another missing cat or dog. Only two things seem to offer potential excitement: Christmas and her ex, James Lacey. This year Agatha is sure that if she invites James to a splendid Christmas dinner, their love will rekindle like a warm Yule log. But that fantasy will have to wait for now. A wealthy widow - who had sent Agatha a letter saying a member of her family intended to kill her - has been found dead. Now Agatha must set out to find the murderer, even though, in her heart, she's still dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones she and James used to know.

©2015 M.C. Beaton (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Bring back Penelope Keith!!

Agatha survived Christmas and it was a night all her guests would forever remember. She SHOULD be content. She has a successful business, a community she loves that also loves her back, great friends......
Unfortunately, Agatha is a bottomless pit of need. She has a new, young assistant detective, Toni. Toni is a gem, but Agatha has trouble getting past Toni's youth and beauty and continually scrutinizes how she fails to measure up to the aesthetic beauty of Toni.
Agatha needs help, a good counselor to guide her, to allow her to have real introspection of herself. Although rehashing Agatha's myriad list of insecurities is tedious, I believe it is necessary. This a a true dilemma in society today; women thinking they aren't good enough and completely lacking a sense of self. I truly believe that this issue is at a crisis level and is literally eroding the fabric of our society today. Let's hope that as Agatha discovers herself, we will learn from this cautionary tale and do the same.

Good story, lackluster performance

OK, Penelope Keith is the performer I first encountered with the AR stories and quite frankly, she set the bar pretty high. Alas, this performance, while competent, is easily eclipsed by Keith. There is little differentiating of voices and Agatha sounds slight and thin. While the performer tries to echo Keith's voice variantion, this simply isn't done well.

The story on the other hand is entertaining and enjoyable with new characters, a couple of attempted misdirections, and even a final twist. A bit disconcerting in this and the previous episode is a developing over use of expressions. Here, it is "snakes and bastards," and previously, "lugubrious." The repeated use of this phrases gives the stories an affected air and almost kitschy. Using infrequently heard words is a treat from time to time, but their repeated invocation is tiresome.

Bad Narrator

As another reviewer pointed out, all the characters sound the same. No range in the narr

It's Not Because She's Not Penelope Keith...

Lots of listeners are saying that this narrator was terrible because she isn't Penelope Keith. That is not true. Wanda McCaddin was just terrible.

You could tell that she had not listened to any of the books that came before this one because she had no clue how to perform the regular characters who appear in all the novels: Agatha, Roy, Mrs Bloxby, Charles, etc. I'm not saying that she needed to do a pitch perfect voice match to Penelope Keith's versions of these characters, but it would've been nice if she'd had an INKLING of psychological and emotional makeup of each as well as an understanding of their relationships to one another so that her performance was reminiscent of what has already been established in the Raisin world.

It was like tuning in to your favorite television show and finding that all of the series regulars had been replaced with new actors. REALLY bad choice on the producer's part.

Also, she had one voice for whenever she was acting as one of the characters: gravelly. Just gravelly. No imagination whatsoever. Whenever she spoke dialogue, regardless of who the character was, she would switch from her normal speaking voice to doing some kind of a weathered person voice even if the character wasn't old or crotchety. Gender did not make a difference to her when voicing a character. EVERYONE sounded the same. She didn't employ different rhythms of speech or pacing to help differentiate between one person and another or, even more importantly, to reflect their character or psycho-emotional state.

It was as if McCaddon was doing the reading just for the money. She wanted to pump it out as quickly as possible, collect her paycheck, and move on to a real acting job - which I can say with authority she is not qualified to do - without any real love or understanding for this series.

And, just so you know, I listened to the whole audio, start to finish, even though I knew early on that Wanda McCaddon was not doing a good job and there was little likelihood that she would improve as the book went on.

Fortunately there is only one more Agatha mystery narrated by this "voice actor." and, fortunately, it's the very next one in the series. So I'm going to take a cue from her and knock it out as quickly as possible so I can move on to a real narrator.

Terrible Narrator

Like this series, but why oh why switch narrators from Penelope Keith to this almost incomprehensible narration? Very little change in tone of voice or manner to distinguish between the characters.