Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: For most of the "real" story of Agatha Christie's disappearance, or at least as much as is publically known, check out this article in the NYTimes Magazine from June 2019, which includes many clips from contemporaneous news articles. For a fictionalized, but very believable, novel based on the same thing, check out Marie Benedict's latest offering. Since Mrs. Christie refused to ever speak about what actually happenend, this may be as close as we get to the "truth".
Agatha and her husband take turns telling the story. Agatha's chapters go back to the past, starting when she met her future husband and going up to the day she disappears. His start with learning of her disappearance, and they alternate until she is "found" at a Yorkshire spa. Her chapters are filled with a growing knowledge that the man she married is not the loving husband she thought he was and that perhaps her mother's advice to make him the absolute focus of her life to the exclusion of all else, even their daughter, is not all it's cracked up to be. His chapters are threaded through with an overlying but vague threat that she made in a letter she left for him before she disappeared that require him to play his part in solving the "mystery".
Benedict tells this story capably, staying very close to the known facts. So close that one wonders what the reader learns that the newspapers haven't already reported. Of course, a novel takes us into the characters' heads in a way that journalism can't, but Benedict seems to have left her imagination by the wayside in inhabiting her characters. Agatha matures throughout the book as she realizes that her marriage is not all that she hoped it would be, and becomes more resolute in her determination to shape her own destiny, but Mr. Christie is very one-dimensional throughout his chapters. I suppose some characters are easier to write than others, but I hope that for Ms. Benedict's next book, she chooses a subject that alows her more free rein with her generous writing talents.
FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.
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