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Agatha Christie – The Secret Adversary | Review

Title: The Secret Adversary

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.75/5

This book was a lot of fun for me because it’s the first of Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence books and so it was nice to go back to the very start when they first met each other. True, I don’t think that Christie’s necessarily at her best when she’s writing these sorts of political thrillers, but I also think that she’s pretty far ahead of her time with it too.

I also liked some of the stuff that Christie wrote here about the differences between the genders, and indeed she showed it both through the narration and through the dialogue that some of the characters had. For example, Tommy tells Tuppence that he’ll protect her, and she turns around and tells him that she’ll protect him too. Pretty interesting for 1922, which is when this was first published.

All in all then, I can see why it might not be your cup of tea if you’re a casual Christie fan, but if you’ve already read a little Marple and Poirot then this is a decent place to turn for more. Personally, I like Tommy and Tuppence, and while I know that a lot of others don’t, I’m still happy enough to be reading them.

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Louise Candlish – The Other Passenger | Review

Title: The Other Passenger

Author: Louise Candlish

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 411

Rating: 4/5

I was sent a signed copy of this book for free as part of a bookish subscription box that reached out to me, but I don’t think that will influence my review. Still, I guess that’s a disclaimer for you.

The theme of the box that I received was all about the commute and this was pretty much the perfect book for it because it was mostly set on the commuter boats that people take to get into the city. As for the genre, it’s basically as close to generic contemporary thriller as you can get, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We have a lot of the classics tropes here, from an unreliable narrator to tons of twists and turns, complex interpersonal relationships and of course that little technique of jumping backwards and forwards through time to advance what’s happening in the present by bringing up something that happened in the past and which changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, purely because as with most of these, half of the point is being taken by surprise. And I will say that while there were one or two things that I called pretty early on, there were also a couple of twists here and there that I didn’t spot.

It probably also helped that I received quite a nice edition of this, a hardback with the author’s signature in it, and so it was quite an aesthetically pleasing read, too. I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of thrillers in general, as I tend to prefer either cosy mysteries, private detectives or gritty police procedural novels, but it certainly did the job and was a pleasant enough read, keeping me going until the end to find out the truth about what happened.

And that brings us on to the question of whether I’d recommend it or not, and that really depends upon the type of reader that you are. If you’re really into modern thrillers and you loved Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, you’re probably going to like this one. There are a ton of twists, more than I’ve seen in a novel of this size in quite a long time, and the characters are just warped enough to keep them interesting.

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