This may have been the first Agatha Christie I ever read.

As a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book back when I was a kid.

Quite groundbreaking as one of the first serial killer stories.

10 people on an island. No way to leave.

One by one they are murdered in this spooky house.

Like most upper middle class Brits of her age, Agatha was somewhat racist. And even more antisemitic.

She got better over the decades, eventually casting homosexuals in positive roles. Surprisingly, the famously conservative old lady even voted to join the EU.

It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1939, as Ten Little Niggers,^[3] after an 1869 minstrel song which serves as a major plot element. The US edition was released i 1940 with the title And Then There Were None, taken from the last five words of the song.

The book is the world’s best-selling mystery, and with over 100 million copies sold is one of the best-selling books of all time. 

While reading the book, I simultaneously watched the 2015 mystery thriller television serial that was first broadcast on BBC One ➙ And Then There Were None.

Quite good.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I enjoyed the 2023 biography of Agatha Christie.

A surprising life story for such a successful author.

Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction. …

… she revisits the most notorious episode of Christie’s life: her disappearance for 11 days in December 1926 …

Her gift for dialogue and for manipulating social stereotypes, as Worsley demonstrates, was formidable, keenly attuned to the proliferating class anxieties of the 20th century; numerous characters are, interestingly, transitional or dispossessed in some way …

Guardian Review

Over the past few years I’ve been reading her 70+ books. Many are very good.

Despite the books, magazines, TV adaptations, movies — Agatha had money troubles most of her life.

When asked “occupation“, Agatha stated “House Wife” her entire life.

She loved buying and maintaining homes. Loved shopping. Did have a social life.

Yet she was incredibly prolific and productive as a writer. Her plots she jotted down in notebooks.

One of the things I like best about Agatha are her books in exotic settings. She loved to travel. And her second husband was an archeologist. Agatha spent a lot of time with him on his digs in the Middle East.

Click PLAY or see a preview on YouTube.

Very good. This is the first Meltzer book I’ve read.

The Escape Artist (2018)

A TV adaptation is planned.

Who is Nola Brown?

Nola is a mystery
Nola is trouble.
And Nola is supposed to be dead.

Her body was found on a plane that mysteriously fell from the sky as it left a secret military base in the Alaskan wilderness. Her commanding officer verifies she’s dead. The US government confirms it. But Jim “Zig” Zigarowski has just found out the truth: Nola is still alive. And on the run.

Zig works at Dover Air Force Base, helping put to rest the bodies of those who die on top-secret missions. Nola was a childhood friend of Zig’s daughter and someone who once saved his daughter’s life. So when Zig realizes Nola is still alive, he’s determined to find her. Yet as Zig digs into Nola’s past, he learns that trouble follows Nola everywhere she goes.

Nola is the US Army’s artist-in-residence-a painter and trained soldier who rushes into battle, making art from war’s aftermath and sharing observations about today’s wars that would otherwise go overlooked. On her last mission, Nola saw something nobody was supposed to see, earning her an enemy unlike any other, one who will do whatever it takes to keep Nola quiet.

Together, Nola and Zig will either reveal a sleight of hand being played at the highest levels of power or die trying to uncover the US Army’s most mysterious secret-a centuries-old conspiracy that traces back through history to the greatest escape artist of all: Harry Houdini.

bradmeltzer.com

Nola has been compared to Lisbeth Salander. NOT a good comparison. Nola is a bad ass ➙ but she’s no Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

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Slough House is the 2021 book in the Slough House series of books by Mick Herron.

That’s a bit confusing.

The latest instalment again features the drunken flatulent Cold War burn out Lamb leading a motley crew of secret service failures from their shabby base near the Barbican – the Slough House of the title – and begins with a brief and brutal assassination abroad before the offended foreign power comes looking for revenge. …

Evening Standard – Slough House by Mick Herron review: Jackson Lamb – a secret agent like no other

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Every once in a while, I read a PD James book.

British culture. Sophistication.

I feel smarter after a PD James book.

Her career overlapped Agatha Christie, so I have to assume she was influenced.

This is not one of her best, in my opinion. The plot a little too farfetched.

Shroud for a Nightingale is a 1971 detective novel written by PD James in her Adam Dalgliesh series.

Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate the death of two student nurses at the hospital nursing school of Nightingale House. …

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Pines (2012) is the first book in the Wayward Pines Trilogy.

I’ve got mixed feelings.

It follows U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke as he unravels the mystery surrounding his unanticipated arrival in the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, following a devastating car accident.  …

The residents of this picturesque town don’t know how they got there and are forbidden to talk about their prior lives. An electric fence surrounds the town, and the residents are under 24-hour surveillance. The mysteries and horrors of the town build until Ethan discovers its secret. Then he must do his part to keep Wayward Pines protected from threats both within and beyond the fence.

The series covers themes of isolation, bucolic Americana, time-displacement, man vs nature, human evolution, and cryonics. …

The novels are the basis for the television series Wayward Pines, produced by M. Night Shyamalan. 

I haven’t seen the 2015 TV series.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.