This book is a classic example of what I love about Agatha Christie: I usually can’t relate the twists and turns of the plot to save my life, but each world she creates is so dense with motives and current events and psychology and bits of herself, that you want to keep going. After her father’s death, Anne Beddingfeld is determined not to be an ordinary spinster and the adventure she desires almost immediately finds her. She is almost a witness to two murders and somehow she’s suddenly on a ship headed for South Africa, trying to solve a diamond theft and fend off numerous suitors, and landing in the middle of a revolution in Johannesburg. Anne is sui generis as a character, developing a fondness for bad guys but ending up with a good guy in the end. Her humanity is sometimes at odds with her spirit of adventure, but she’d rather let ten villains go than accidentally persecute someone unjustly. “I wish…that one could be sure that the right people were the ones to be killed,” she observes of the fighting in Johannesburg, but also of life more generally perhaps. “I mean the ones who wanted to fight—not just all the poor people who happen to live in the parts where the fighting is going on” (276).