My rating of this book reflects my fascination with Christie's incredibly detailed observations of Britain immediately after WWII, which results in a plot that captures the country's zeitgeist: desperate people taking desperate measures. Britons in 'There Is a Tide' are sick of high taxes and waiting in lines at the bakery, and "foreigners," and penury and sacrifice, and their stiff upper lips have given way now that the crisis has passed. The Cloade family in rural Warmsley Vale is no different; their benefactor was killed in the London blitz, his young wife inherited everything, and they are all terrified of living within their own straitened resources. As Hercule Poirot observes, the several murders is is a case full of motive.

Others have recommended not reading the last chapter, in which Christie resolves Lynn Marchmont's confusion about her gender role in a way incomprehensible to contemporary readers. You can NOT read the final chapter without doing damage to the book, and in fact I wish Agatha Christie hadn't felt the need to tie up Marchmont's life in a scary little noose. But she did, and if we consider that Marchmont is the character closest to Christie's own experience in the First World War, we have to wonder about her conclusion. Agatha Miller quickly married her fiancee Archie Christie, an RAF flyer on leave for Christmas 1914, and while he served in France, she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses in her local hospital, where she got a quick education in nursing and pharmacy. Several years after he returned from war, he announced he was in love with their friend Nancy Neele. Their marital difficulties precipitated Christie's famous 11-day disappearance, and in some accounts she never completely got over their divorce.

It is interesting to think about Lynn's confession of commitment in the context of Christie's wartime experience. Did she regret marrying so quickly? Question her own commitment? Or did Lynn's decision express Christie's own perception that she had made a poor choice? At the very least, the fact that this is an acceptable ending tells how how much things have changed for most women in 70 years.