I really liked this story. It was like dissecting complex origami, like deconstructing a puzzle of what we thought was one image, and discovering the importance of each piece as we begin to see a completely different image, as all our perspectives are altered.

We start off thinking we don’t like Nan. No, in fact, we strongly dislike her. And we don’t like the author’s depiction of Agatha Christie—well, Nan’s depiction. We don’t like it at all. It doesn’t sit right. It shows a petty and self-absorbed Agatha—one who has nothing but pity for herself and is wallowing in shame, clinging to what cannot be restored. That’s not who we’ve always pictured. But as told by Nan, Agatha’s husband’s mistress—what else were we expecting?

As history unravels and present events are revealed, everything gets turned on its head.  We see. Oh yes, and by halfway through we are beginning to see…we are coming to understand…and there are some really horrible parts to this story, bits we’d rather not know, but we know that these sorts of things really did happen, and there’s a social commentary in here with these true-to-life issues. But as these events of the past are revealed and intertwined, we shift our allegiances: now we want justice for Nan, and we develop a new hope for Agatha…

Of course, this is fiction, speculative fiction at that—but it had to be approved by the Agatha Christie Estate, so it makes me wonder that even they were okay with the suggested fictional outcome… It plays out like a very dark, emotionally hefty Agatha Christie mystery, down to the secondary characters with sinister connections and the mystery unravelled at the end, including secrets never to be revealed—to anyone other than the reader, that is. 

This was uniquely written from a first person omniscient perspective. You don’t see that much. If ever. It was different, and I can’t imagine it was easy to manage, but Nan tells us this story, from her perspective, managing to recount all the bits she’s gathered from others and put them down too as best possible, as they might have happened. It makes her an unreliable narrator, one we don’t quite trust, and especially at the start, as how she’s portrayed Agatha. But we want to see how the truth is revealed after all and we stick with her, growing to pick out things she’s embellished and the truths therein.

We’ll never know what happened to Agatha Christie during those days of her disappearance, but this story certainly piques the imagination.