Showing results by author "M. C. Beaton" in All Categories

Jenny Sutherland is pretty, but the lovely country girl is also vain. Her guardian has decided that a London season is just the thing to give the fair Jenny a sorely deserved set-down. Meanwhile, the handsome Duke of Pelham, owner of 67 Clarges Street, has returned from Europe at last - to find a wife. Used to women doting on him, the Duke turns the ton against the disdainful Jenny who dares to spurn him at her very first London soiree. Alas, he’s fallen in love with the miss he’s just ruined!

When Fiona Macleod is sent by her guardian aunt and uncle to spend a London season with the Tribble sisters, it is something of a last resort. At nineteen, Fiona is a beautiful and wealthy Scottish heiress, yet for some mysterious reason, her several proposals of marriage over the past few years have all fallen through at the last moment. Amy and Effy Tribble, professional chaperones whose School for Manners has recently made them the talk of fashionable London society, are always short of cash and gladly take on Fiona as a new client.

Destined for Dover, Miss Pym has her matchmaking work cut out for her when she encounters the pretty but hoydenish Lady Deborah Western! Encouraged by an unruly twin brother, the spirited, golden-haired Deborah seems set on dressing and acting the tomboy, much to the dismay of her handsome neighbor, the Earl of Ashton....

Morag Fleming, the Countess of Murr, had been bride to the most lecherous lord in Scotland - yet this ravishingly lovely girl had never been touched. Needless to say, she had never borne a child; yet as a young widow she came to London with a fine son in tow.

The idyllic Cotswolds village of Thirk Magna is best known for the medieval church of St. Ethelred and its bells, which are the pride and glory of the whole community. As the bell-ringers get ready for the visit of the dashing Bishop Peter Salver-Hinkley, the whole village is thrown into a frenzy. Meanwhile, Agatha convinces one of the bell-ringers, the charming lawyer Julian Brody, to hire her to investigate the mystery of the Bishop's ex-fiancee: a local heiress, Jennifer Toynby, who went missing years ago and whose body was never found.

A woman of independent means with a healthy dose of cynicism about those of the male persuasion, Harriet Tremayne is content with her circle of spinster friends and their devotion to literature, women's rights, and intellectual interests. When she determines to undertake the London season for her beautiful but featherbrained niece, however, she concedes she must appear less a bluestocking and more fashionable to successfully sponsor this impossible young lady whose only real desire, is chocolate.

Lady Beatrice Marsham is in quite a coil. No sooner is she widowed from a brutish gambling husband, than her heartless family is forcing her into another horrid marriage. Fleeing by stagecoach to the Brighton seaside, the proud beauty meets Miss Hannah Pym, who is determined to find her a proper match.... The handsome and kind Lord Alistair Munro would be perfect. Unfortunately, he is convinced of the ton gossip that proclaims Lady Beatrice a cruel flirt. Miss Pym, however, is not worried.

Sergeant Hamish Macbeth--Scotland's most quick-witted but unambitious policeman--returns in M.C. Beaton's new mystery in her New York Times bestselling series. From the author of the Agatha Raisin series. When Police Sergeant Hamish Macbeth hears reports of a haunted castle near Drim, he assumes...

From the author of the Agatha Raisin television series... Death of Yesterday: A Hamish Macbeth Mystery When a local woman tells Sergeant Hamish Macbeth that she doesn't remember what happened the previous evening, he doesn't begin to worry. She had been out drinking, after all, and he'd prefer...

Followers of the series will notice in this volume some personality changes in the odd assortment of retainers who keep the infamous house at 67 Clarges Street, in London’s Mayfair, at the ready for whatever entrepreneur will rent it as a launching pad into the London social season. This time the renters are an unlikely couple, the Goodenoughs, apparently father and daughter; she a great beauty, he silent and mysterious. Their secrets eventually become known to the downstairs troupe, but the indomitable butler Rainberd rallies the support forces.

When Henrietta Bascombe opens a confectionary shop in order to turn her pittance of an inheritance into a fortune, her friends are shocked to hear of such a well-bred lady going into trade. The earl of Carrisdown is both drawn to and repelled by her shop girl status. Undaunted, Henrietta proceeds to hang out the traditional confectioners' sign of a golden pineapple and soon finds a set of beautiful women in her employ, drawing the attention of earl of Carrisdown's younger brother and best friend.

The poor relations, those genteel paupers of society who live on little more than their dignity, have banded together and started The Poor Relation hotel, hoping to be bought out by their embarrassed relations - but as the hotel prospered, they began to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Now once more they are in need of funds. To stoop to crime in their days of poverty was one thing, but to turn to it again when they have enjoyed a certain amount of success is quite another. But they all agree: the hotel must go on.

"Oh to be as beautiful as Euphemia!" plain Jane Hart sighs when she joins her sister Euphemia at Number 67 Clarges Street for the season. Then Lord Tregarthan might notice her, as she had noticed him and forever lost her heart to the most eligible bachelor of the town. But Euphemia’s fate is to flirt through balls and into the arms of a marquis, while Jane’s is to stay home, amusing herself with snooping into the strange death of Miss Clara Vere-Baxton, a former tenant of Number 67.

When private detective Agatha Raisin comes across a severed leg in a roadside hedge, it looks like she is about to become involved in a particularly gruesome murder. Looks, however, can be deceiving, as Agatha discovers when she is employed to investigate a case of industrial espionage at a factory where nothing is quite what it seems. The factory mystery soon turns to murder and a bad-tempered donkey turns Agatha into a national celebrity, before bringing her ridicule and shame.

Believing that someone is trying to murder her, gorgeous Jane Wetherby asks Hamish Macbeth to spend Christmas with her and an exclusive group of friends at her Scottish island health farm. With a cold in his head and no place to go for the holidays, Hamish accepts her invitation. He thinks the lady is a bit daft, but, arriving on the lonely isle of Eileencraig, he feels a prickle of foreboding. The locals are openly threatening; the other guests, especially a terrible snob named Heather Todd, are barely civil.

When Private Investigator Agatha Raisin learns that her friend and one-time lover Charles Fraith is to be married to a mysterious socialite, Miss Mary Brown-Field, she sees it as her duty to find out what she can about the woman. Coming up empty, Agatha - out of selfless concern for Charles, of course - does the only sensible thing she can think of: She crashes their wedding, which ends in a public altercation. Nursing a hangover the next morning, she gets a phone call from Charles, with even more disturbing news: Mary has been murdered.

Agatha Raisin’s private detective agency is working flat out on a series of shop burglaries. The break-ins seem to have taken a violent turn when a friend of Agatha’s is murdered during a raid on his shop. Although determined to nail the villains, Agatha still makes time to help Sir Charles Fraith prepare to stage a massive, hugely glamorous, promotional event in the grounds of his ancestral home, Barfield House.

As the youngest of four unmarried vicar's daughters, Frederica feared her destiny was to die of tedium in the sleepy village of Barton Sub Edge. Her looks deemed "unfortunate", her willful notions damned as "difficult", she never dreamt the arrival of a rake would challenge her fate in the most surprising way.

Nobody loves an honest man--or that was what police sergeant Hamish Macbeth tried to tell newcomer Paul English. Paul had moved to a house in Cnothan, a sour village on Hamish's beat, where he immediately started to stir up outrage among his neighbors. Paul first attended church in Lochdubh and...

Toni and Agatha are in the car on the way to Officer Bill Wong’s long-awaited wedding when, much to their shock, a naked young man bursts through a hedge on the side of the road and comes running toward them. Terrified, he explains that he has just seen a dead body in the woods. Toni lends him an old t-shirt to cover himself, Agatha calls the police, and the young man takes them to the spot where he saw the body, across from a meadow where the Mircester Naturist Club is due to have its annual summer barbecue.