The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is historical fiction, imagining what may have happened when Agatha Christie "disappeared" in early December 1926. The facts are there, the car, the letters, the search, but around this Benedict wraps a fictional story of the Christies' first meeting through their married life. The majority of the book alternates between a manuscript Agatha wrote chronicling their lives together and the events around the disappearance, starting with the discovery of her empty car. The problem is no one is likable. Archie is a jerk. Agatha is too desperate to please him and right until the end too gutless to stand up for herself. I couldn't even really care about the daughter, Rosalind, who when she showed up in the tale, was too calm and pulled together. The grand reveal at the end wasn't really grand or much of a reveal. It did redeem the rest of the book a bit, making you look a little differently at...
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The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Man in the Brown Suit has been on my list to read for a while. I've read a lot of Agatha Christie's, but this is a Colonel Race book, and he has never been my favorite of her characters. Honestly, I should have read it earlier. Anne Beddingfield, our amateur sleuth, is awesome. She's practical, but full of grit and she doesn't frighten easily. She's also a hopeless romantic. Anne was raised by her anthropologist father, a well-known academic but a poor man more wrapped up in the dead than the living. After he dies, Anne refuses a more "suitable" arrangement and determines to find adventure. Then it happens - a man on the train platform near her falls to his death after seeing something that frightens him. The doctor who tends to the man wears a brown suit, and after he leaves hurriedly, Anne has her suspicions as to whether or not he is actually a doctor. She...
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