This book is an absolute hot mess. I will start by saying that every  negative review on this book is accurate. If I were not working on reading the entire Christie bibliography, I would not have picked this up. Let me assure you, unless you are also reading the complete works of Christie, you should not read this. It is truly awful.

In her recent biography of Christie, Lucy Worsley advances a theory that the author may have been suffering from dementia during this late phase of her life. That makes a lot of sense given how disjointed, disorganized, confusing, and poorly written this book is.

It attempts to be a spy thriller but fails to generate any tension or excitement. She also spends a lot of the book essentially telling young people to get off her lawn, commenting at length on the youth movement for social and racial justice in the late 1960s. 

The book is oddly structured, and the story never really takes off. The ending is so implausible and sudden, it’s like she just decided to end it and tacked on a “solution” that comes out of left field but not in a good way. It’s several hours of my life I will never get back.