Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came by M.C. Beaton
Marital bliss was short-lived for Agatha Raisin. Her marriage to James Lacey was a disaster from the beginning, and in the end, he left her-not for another woman, but for God. After having been miraculously cured of a brain tumor, James has decided to join a monastery in France. Agatha can usually depend on her old friend, Sir Charles Fraith, to be there when times are tough, but even Charles has abandoned her, dashing off to Paris to marry a young French tart.
July 2002, floods in eastern and central Texas were so severe that many counties were declared disaster areas and eight people lost their lives. In August 2002, in central and eastern Europe, dozens of deaths and untold irreplaceable cultural and historic sites were destroyed by flooding. In Asia, during the summer of 2002, at least 1,800 people died. Though often tragic, there are floods throughout the world every year, many of them devastating and deadly.
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.