A cold, dull January in the lovely Cotswold village of Carsley finds Agatha visiting the nearby village of Winter Parva for a pig roast. Just before the pig is placed on the coals, Agatha realizes that it is actually a man. The prospective dinner is Gary Beech, a village policeman widely detested for his nit-picking ways. His ex-wife, originally a plain Jane whose wealthy second husband had sent her off to the States for extensive plastic surgery, wants Agatha to look into the death of the first. Agatha's suspicions of her new client's story are complicated when she too is murdered, prompting Agatha to continue her investigation with hair-raising results. Agatha's best detective, Toni Gilmour, has been looking for a new job ever since Agatha interfered with her love life, but she still has the rest of her seasoned crew and the help of her ex-husband and several friends. Threats against Agatha and her band suggest that this is a more complicated crime than she originally supposed. In the end, Agatha proves once more than even though she's vain, nosy and man-crazy, she does have a knack for solving crimes.

The uncompelling mystery doesn't provide the brightest hour for the often-annoying Agatha (Busy Body, 2010, etc.). But she and the cleverly drawn satellites who surround her provide good value for the faithful.

A post-Christmas pig roast goes horribly awry when the "pig" on the spit turns out to be a local policeman. Agatha's agency investigates, of course, in this long-running series (The Skeleton in the Closet). [Library marketing.]

At the start of Beaton's entertaining 22nd Agatha Raisin mystery (after 2010's Busy Body), Agatha has a run-in with an overzealous policeman, Gary Beech, who tickets her for basically nothing on a clogged road outside her Cotswolds village of Carsely. After Beech tickets her a second time for slightly exceeding the speed limit, Agatha announces in the village store: "I'd like to kill him.... May he roast slowly over a spit in hell!" When Beech turns up dead, his decapitated body substituted for the pig that was supposed to be roasting over a fire as part of a post-Christmas celebration on a neighboring village's green, Agatha falls under suspicion. Meanwhile, she must cope with, among other personal problems, uncertainty about the men in her life, including her ex-husband. That even in a heavy fog those basting the "pig" fail to notice that it's a human being may strike some as less than credible. (Oct.)