Alice Beeton never meant to wind up single and childless on the wrong side of fifty. Like her distant relative Mrs Beeton – yes, that Mrs Beeton – she had hoped to have her own spic-and-span household by now. In reality, she lives in an immaculate but dingy basement flat in a rather shabby block in Kensington with Agatha, her fiercely intelligent, if rather over-territorial, corgi-Jack Russell cross.
Now Alice runs the Good Household Management Agency, providing discreet domestic staff to extravagant townhouses and sprawling country piles.
So when Camille Messent calls in urgent need of a new housekeeper, Miss Beeton sends out new hire Enya. She’s rather forward but she does come with impeccable references and is fluent en français.
But in the early hours of New Year’s Day, Alice is rudely awakened with the news that Enya has been found dead. As the intriguing, if somewhat scruffy, Detective Rigby struggles to drum up an adequate investigation and the wealthy family and their party guests close rank, Miss Beeton takes it upon herself to solve the crime…

I’d been looking forward to ‘Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency’ as a cosy pre-Christmas read. The cover looks cute. Miss Beeton, a distant relative of the Mrs Beeton of the famous cookery book, is a woman in her fifties, a Christie fan with a dog called Agatha, who turns amateur sleuth when one of her employees at her domestic staf agency turns up dead on New Year’s Day. I was expecting it to be quiet, harmless fun. It turned out to be quiet and harmless but not much fun.

At first, I thought everything would fine. The writing was a little mannered and Miss Beeton seemed too much like a Barbara Pym character to be a child of the Seventies but I could see the seeds of a mystery being sown and a cast of eccentric characters with unusual but useful backgrounds being assembled, so I carried on.

And then… nothing much happened. For an hour.

Normally, I applaud a mystery where the detective’s character is firmly rooted in reality but Miss Beeton’s reality is not interesting enough to take so long to establish.

I was two hours into a ten-hour audiobook, listening to a description of Miss Beeton preparing Christmas lunch for her execrable brother and his family at the country pile she, the eldest, did not inherit but is secretly keeping afloat and I realised I was bored. We are still days away from a dead body being discovered., most of the characters are unpleasant but not unpleasant enough for me to enjoy hating them. I felt as if I was wading through all the small slights and casual abuses that can take the shine off a family Christmas without being engaged by the story or the people.

This is a highly-rated book on GoodReads. The narrator is doing a good job. Probably, it all comes together once poor old Enya dies. But I’ve run out of patience so I’m setting it aside at 19%