Hilary Craven has lost the will to live, Mrs Betterton is already dead. Then Hilary is asked to impersonate the dead woman and to trace her husband - a missing nuclear scientist - and her will to live returns. A faked air disaster, a string of radio-active pearls, a leper colony floundering in the dry heat of the Moroccan desert. Hilary is lead towards a terrifying discovery and her new found enthusiasm for life turns into ice-cold fear...Christie based this book partly on the activities of two famous physicists of the early 1950s: Bruno Ponecorvo, who defected to Russia, and Emil Fuchs, who spied for the Russians. It is another of Christie's light-hearted thriller novels featuring a daring and fearless heroine.
Book Details
Format
mass_market
ISBN-10
0671702300
ISBN-13
9780671702304
Publication Date
Unknown
Item Weight
0.30 pounds
Length
6.73 inch
Width
0.67 inch
Height
4.17 inch
First Sentence
The man behind the desk moved a heavy glass paper weight four inches to the right.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom, the daughter of a wealthy American stockbroker. Her father died when she was eleven years old. Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16, she went to Mrs. Dryden's finishing school in Paris to study singing and piano. In 1914, at age 24, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. While he went away to war, she worked as a nurse and wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which wasn't published until four years later. When her husband came back from the war, they had a daughter. In 1928 she divorced her husband, who had been having an affair. In 1930, she married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and a Catholic. She was happy in the early years of her second marriage, and did not divorce her husband despite his many affairs. She travelled with her husband's job, and set several of her novels set in the Middle East. Most of her other novels were set in a fictionalized Devon, where she was born.
Agatha Christie is credited with developing the "cozy style" of mystery, which became popular in, and ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction in England in the 1920s and '30s, an age of which she is considered to have been Queen. In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays, and a series of romantic novels using the pen name Mary Westmacott. She was the single most popular mystery writer of all time. In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
