She’s worked hard to supplant Agatha in Archie’s affections, and seems far more scheming than sympathetic. Of course, grace is the last thing our ostensible heroine Nancy O’Dea is expecting from her lover’s wife. The further I read, the more I was dazzled by what I discovered was also an extremely clever sleight of hand, as Nina de Gramont spins several different and seemingly unrelated mystery threads before snapping them all together into a breathtaking tapestry of crime and heartbreak and, most importantly, communion and grace. It did, however, show itself surprisingly willing to lean into a less than decorous – but very much appreciated by this reader – rage against the horrors committed against women in the early 20th century.īut at about the 72% mark, I realized that this novel, fictionalizing the relationship between Agatha and the woman who replaced her in her marriage to Colonel Archie Christie, was something much more than even the best of its contemporaries in the historical fiction genre.

Purporting to advance a theory that explains Dame Christie’s eleven-day disappearance in the 1920s, The Christie Affair reads at first much like the absorbing works of Paula McLain and Gaynor Arnold: solidly researched historical fiction that sensitively explores the emotions of the women involved in turbulent events. I admit that when I first started reading this book, I expected a fairly tame historical mystery graced by the fictional presence of the grandmaster of mystery writing herself, Agatha Christie.

The christie affair book