Title: N Or M?
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 304
Rating 3.25/5
This book is one of Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence books, and while I’m a reasonably big fan of those books compared to the average Agatha Christie reader, I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit disappointed by this one. I think that’s because it had so much promise, dealing as it did with espionage during the Second World War. In particular, it dealt with the idea of The Fifth Column, German agents who were living in the UK in a sort of Trojan Horse type situation.
And the story itself was interesting enough, neither better than nor worse than the majority of the plots that I’ve seen from Christie and pretty unique because of the fact that it’s more of an espionage thriller than it is a cozy mystery, although the reality is that it has elements of both. I think that’s what made it worth reading for me, although the story itself was just fine and it was of course very well written, being a Christie book.
Other than that, I’m not sure what else there is that I can say about this one, because even just a couple of hours after finishing it, not much of it remains with me. The only thing that I will say is that I quite often find that Christie’s books either have excellent characters or an excellent setting, but rarely both. In this one, it’s mostly the characters that stand out, and indeed there were points at which I sort of zoned out of what was happening and couldn’t remember whereabouts we actually were.
Overall, it’s a decent enough little book and pretty typical for Agatha Christie. And that’s one more ticked off.
