The Mystery of Mrs. Christie
A Novel
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4.0 • 304 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
"A stunning story... The ending is ingenious, and it's possible that Benedict has brought to life the most plausible explanation for why Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926."—The Washington Post
The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room returns with a thrilling reconstruction of one of the most notorious events in literary history: Agatha Christie's mysterious 11-day disappearance in 1926.
In December 1926, Agatha Christie goes missing. Investigators find her empty car on the edge of a deep, gloomy pond, the only clues some tire tracks nearby and a fur coat left in the car—strange for a frigid night. Her World War I veteran husband and her daughter have no knowledge of her whereabouts, and England unleashes an unprecedented manhunt to find the up-and-coming mystery author. Eleven days later, she reappears, just as mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming amnesia and providing no explanations for her time away.
The puzzle of those missing eleven days has persisted. With her trademark historical fiction exploration into the shadows of the past, acclaimed author Marie Benedict brings us into the world of Agatha Christie, imagining why such a brilliant woman would find herself at the center of such murky historical mysteries.
What is real, and what is mystery? What role did her unfaithful husband play, and what was he not telling investigators?
Agatha Christie novels have withstood the test of time, due in no small part to Christie's masterful storytelling and clever mind that may never be matched, but Agatha Christie's untold history offers perhaps her greatest mystery of all.
Fans of The Secrets We Kept, The Lions of Fifth Avenue, and The Alice Network will enjoy this riveting saga of literary history, suspense, and love gone wrong.
Other Bestselling Historical Fiction from Marie Benedict:
Lady Clementine
The Only Woman in the Room
Carnegie's Maid
The Other Einstein
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Benedict (Lady Clementine) delivers an uneven novel of what might have happened to Agatha Christie during the 11 days in 1926 when she famously went missing. Chapters alternate between a memoir manuscript purportedly written by Christie, and the story of Christie's husband, Archie, who becomes a suspect in her disappearance. No one knows what really happened, and the clever premise here is that Christie vanished deliberately so as to ensnare Archie in a trap as payback for his infidelities. The saccharine manuscript, beginning in 1912 with the line, "I could not have written a more perfect man," chronicles Agatha and Archie's courtship and early years of marriage, and her efforts to please him. More satisfying are the chapters in which a heinous Archie emerges and is forced to follow Agatha's instructions in a letter in order to escape prosecution ("How do you want this story to end? It seems to me that there are two paths from which you can choose, the first involving a softer landing than the second, though neither are without bumps and bruises, of course"). As the investigators begin to suspect foul play, thanks to phony clues left by Agatha, Archie is forced to admit compromising truths. While the manuscript chapters won't ring true with Christie fans, the story makes for good fun.
Customer Reviews
See AllEnjoyable
And worth getting through until the end
Recommend
Fun read that I couldn’t put down
A bit of a chore.
The premise of this novel is interesting enough, but I found it to be quite poorly edited. The text is fraught with anatopisms that jarred me out of believing that I was in England in the early 1900s—for example, a reference to the “hood” of a car, rather than the “bonnet.” The persistent lack of a possessive adjective with gerunds (e.g., the erroneous “I appreciate you taking the time,” instead of “I appreciate your taking the time”) makes me wonder if anyone actually went over the text thoroughly prior to publication. I found this error particularly irritating when it cropped up in Agatha’s dialogue. Lastly, the present tense in Archie’s timeline is, I’m sure, designed to lend immediacy to those scenes, but it comes across as being more cumbersome than enriching. The novel has some redeeming qualities—it’s a fairly quick read and reasonably entertaining—but, for me, it falls flat overall.