M. C. Beaton

M. C. Beaton is the pen name of bestselling novelist Marion Chesney. She was a prolific writer of historical romances and small village mysteries. Born in Scotland, the author began her writing career as a fiction buyer for a Glasgow bookstore and worked as a theater critic, newspaper reporter, and editor.

The author wrote under various names, most notably as M. C. Beaton for her Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin series. She also wrote under the names Sarah Chester, Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Marion Gibbons, Jennie Tremaine, and Charlotte Ward.

M.C. BEATON® is a registered trademark of M.C. Beaton Limited

Featured Books By Author

Lady Fortescue Steps Out

The impecunious Lady Fortescue, widowed and alone save for two loyal, unpaid servants, has sold off almost all of the furnishings in her large Bond Street home and faces a grim future as a member of the aristocracy too proud to seek employment or charity, yet too poor to survive on the infrequent largess of wealthy relatives oblivious to her plight. Salvation arrives in the unlikely form of old Colonel Sandhurst, an equally impoverished retired military man who falls at her feet in a hunger-induced faint one afternoon in Hyde Park. The two decide to join forces: the Colonel will share Lady Fortescue's home, and they will invite others of their station and situation to live with them and pool their resources. Thus is born what eventually becomes one of London's most popular hotels, The Poor Relation, to which the nobility flocks to enjoy the novelty of being waited upon by members of their own class.
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The Chocolate Debutante

A woman of independent means with a healthy dose of cynicism about the male persuasion, Harriet Tremayne is content with her circle of spinster friends and their devotion to literature, women's rights, and intellectual interests. However, when she determines to undertake a London Season for her beautiful but featherbrained niece, she concedes she must appear less a bluestocking and more fashionable to successfully sponsor this impossible young lady whose only real desire, it seems, is to consume chocolate. Certainly her modish new appearance has nothing to do with the attentions of Lord Dangerfield, a wicked man of the world who has designs on the fair niece, yet spends an inordinate amount of time trying to sell Harriet on the virtues of his all-too-obvious attributes…
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The Miser of Mayfair

It was the fashion during Regency to hire a house for the Season in Mayfair-the heart of London's fashionable West End-at a disproportionately high rent for sometimes very inferior accommodation. So why is it that Number 67 Clarges Street, a town house complete with staff, remains vacant season after season? The home of numerous families in the past to whom ill luck-even death-has befallen, Number 67 has been damned as unlucky. In the Miser of Mayfair, salvation seems to come at last in the form of a Mr. Roderick Sinclair, who has confirmed his intentions to let the house for the Season. The staff are overjoyed-until they find that Mr. Sinclair is a terrible miser and is planning no parties. Furthermore, his ward, Fiona, seems not to have a bright idea in her head. Only Rainbird, the clever and elegant butler of Number 67, plots with Fiona to bewitch, bedazzle, and confuse the earl into seeing things their way.
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Books By
M. C. Beaton