This Review Is Longer Than the Book

Death of a Charming Man by M.C. Beaton

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
No village in the Highlands is too isolated or too full of fat, old ratbags that it won't pull a handsome, well-educated Londoner in to purchase a dilapidated croft and then get himself murdered.

Sexual tension is a great dramatic device, but can it go too far? After 9 of these, Beaton finally gets Priscilla and Hamish together, only to undo it all in this book.
They make a good investigating team, mostly because Priscilla doesn't have to play the stupid Watson for Hamish to explain it all to. She's smart and she's full of moxie. She goes right to people who are threatening her man and makes them back down. But she still thinks she should make him into something other than what he is. She should keep her dainty mitts off of him ... and his cook stove.
And that cheap, trashy Sophy comes along trying to bust a move on Hamish, who isn't stupid himself. He knows what she's doing and will put up with it. But will she put up with being left by the side of the road? She's not meant for him either, but at least Beaton should give Hamish a leg-over. Poor guy.
Could there really be a block of flats called “Winnie Mandela Court” that would be full of skinheads, or is this some of the famous Scottish humor? Revenge on skinheads?
Are there any in-jokes I’m missing because I’m from the wrong side of the pond?
Oh right, the "mystery." Do we really care? We're not reading them for that are we?
It isn’t much of a mystery whether Peter is dead if the title of the book is Death of a Charming Man, is it? There are alternative titles, because he's not the only one who dies. But they're all titled "Death of ..." and he's the prime fly in the Drim ointment. It's all his fault that the village goes to pieces. He's someone who needed to be killed. Whoop! Hope I didn't give too much away.
I like this series so much better than the Agatha Raisin one.





View all my reviews.
I'll be facilitatin' a discussion on this in Second Life at the Bookstacks in Awen, Monday, May 18, if anyone is interested. We'll see if anyone shows up. It's at 11am SLT (aka:PST). The general theme is Cozy Mysteries and next month I'm planning to read and discuss (if only with myself, which is typical because I'm the most interesting person I know) Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the first book in that series. I'd have done the first book in the Hamish Macbeth series, but copies are hard to come by and expensive (even the paperbacks!) when you do, so in keeping with the Scottish theme, I went for cheap and chose a more recent title that should still be in libraries and already in paperback.