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Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener (Agatha Raisin #3)
by M.C. Beaton - 4/5
What makes the Potted Gardener a teensy weensy memorable read are the leanness of its storytelling and the timing of its progress. The discovery of the culprit was too cut and dried but that's not a real complaint, because in these days where everything looks to have been thought of, how can we criticize a book for not indulging in cliches?
Being a very short book, The Potted Gardener is a sizable improvement over the book that preceded it, where everything that its successor achieves, it failed to accomplish. So, kudos to M.C. Beaton for being inspired and for giving us a murder mystery where there are not too many suspects, where the real culprit had been suspected by Agatha, where the police is not completely clueless, and where the unrelated ongoing minutiae of the life in the village is interesting. Add to that the reserved and slightly untapped revelations about the victim's past and the very speedy developments of the case, and we find ourselves pleased with a book that had little scope for ambition to begin with. After rejecting a couple of highfalutin books that were unreadable to me, The Potted Gardener looks like an antidote.
Sometimes choosing small books seem like cheating in the annual reading challenge, but it can work wonders with the total number of pages for the year. I have realized that, for me, big books can't be taken in oversize bites. IMHO, books over 800 pages can rarely sustain the interest of this reader over one day. OTOH, small books like The Potted Gardener, packed with action (of the kind totally alien to the term understood by some Hollywood movies) can be read without the time appearing to be dragging on. This put a new spin on things, and I duly will consider marathoning M.C. Beaton's books, as I'm currently not impressed with my pages total for the month. Writing this review has been as useful as reading the book has been as enjoyable. Now I'm off reading more of the same author.
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