De Gromant does a good job of giving the murder portion of the story the feel of an Agatha Christie novel. Yet by the end of the book it makes perfect sense and was quite brilliant by the author to structure the book this way.

The Christie Affair initially didn’t capture my attention the way I was hoping it would, and it felt a little like a bait-and-switch. The unlikely alliances, complex motivations, and jaw-dropping surprises will keep you riveted until the very last page. Archie, leaving on a weekend with Nan, informs Agatha of his intentions to leave her and end their marriage. Archie tells Nan to stay away for the time being, and Nan goes North to Yorkshire to stay at the Bellefort Hotel and Spa. This story thou, I believe would have worked equally well without the need for mixing up the real events of Agatha Christie’s disappearance.De Gramont takes us back to County Cork, Ireland in 1919 where the young Nan O'Dea will be residing with the Sisters of Mercy Convent.

She may or may not have made a stop at the nearby village of Godalming to peer into the ground-floor windows of the house where her husband, Archie Christie, was a guest for the weekend. As the country mobilizes to find the authoress, Nan relishes readers with a tale of the present investigation and her very troubled past in Ireland. She becomes friends with another girl, Bess, who is being regularly assaulted by a priest, Father Joseph. What I loved most is there was a murder mystery within the story that had an Agatha Christie feel to it. This is Nan O'Dea's story, a fictional character very loosely based on Archie Christie's mistress and second wife.

Agatha is aware of the relationship between Nan, whom she knows and her husband Archie but remains hopeful that her marriage can be saved. Example: on p142 the second tier character miraculously finds Agatha Christie--- in all of England--- it was too pat, too much of how they could have possibly have found her was left off. She had narrowly missed running into Finbarr, who had received a letter from Nan not too long ago describing her affair and her plan to seduce Archie. The eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing is one of the most debated 'unsolved' mysteries of all time.

In her slim and penetrating 1990 biography simply titled “ Agatha Christie,” Gill observes that Christie registered at that Harrogate spa under the alias “Teresa Neele.An example: why was the protagonist off on a planned holiday to that particular obscure hotel where most of the last part of the book occurs (we find out in about 100 pages). This is the second book I've read lately about the 11 day disappearance of Agatha Christie back in 1926. At first I didn’t understand why the reader was getting so much of Nan’s backstory, but to me this book read like a puzzle and I enjoyed slowly putting the pieces together.

Nan O'Dea is an intriguing character in her own right, and given all the backstory that was added, she's a compelling character and 'rival' to Agatha, i. If the author had simply built a book from the storyline around Nan, then I imagine it would have been a decent read. Marston are actually one of the nuns from the convent (Sister Mary) and Father Joseph -- they had decided to run away together.Instead, this Nan revels in her own agency, coolly confessing that she staked out Archie for a long time and engineered the affair. I’d also warn that the book proceeds along at a fairly unhurried pace in the first half, so I’d recommend setting your expectations accordingly.