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Jan 24, 2017
Nanosynergy
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fiction-1920s
A 1924 mystery/romance by Dame Agatha Christie - who knew!? Spunky Anne Beddingfield - the young (over age 18), unmarried daughter of a scientist - loses her father. Finding herself "an orphan," she chooses to use her pittance of an inheritance to book a berth on a ship to South Africa in pursuit of adventure - trying to solve the mystery of the man in the brown suit. With smarts, persistence, dumb luck, and the help/hindrance of new-found friends, Miss Beddingfield survives several attempts on
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I vaguely remember reading this back in my teens, and I remember loving the heroine and then getting disgusted with her and most of the book. I suspect I'm less demanding of perfection now, so I enjoyed this book these many decades later. This really isn't typical Christie at all, it's more an old-fashioned thriller/gothic story that feels like Rider Haggard. Or perhaps Crocodile on the Sandbank, which was a pastiche of Haggard. At other times I thought of Tommy and Tuppence, as this has some of
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I really couldn't get into this book. It was super slow.
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This was a missed Christie for me! It was an interesting enough plot, although I did find some of the discussion about the machinations of the plot a little tiresome and made my mind wander. The characters were interesting, although Anne's views on relationships between men and women are quite dated, to say the least, as are the references to race.
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This was one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. Re-reading it again now, I still enjoyed it, but the red herrings and deliberate obfuscations were surprising. I remembered Agatha being slightly more fair in hiding her villains. There seemed to be a few plot holes as well, but it's a good read. (I remember thinking that Suzanne Blair was quite old when I first read this as a teenager, and had to laugh when I saw that she is 30!)
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4.5 stars - Chirp Audio Book Narrated by Emilia Fox
May 05, 2015
Unsolved ☕︎ Mystery
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