Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

In a familiar refrain—if you have been reading my book reviews—once again, I am not sure how I feel about this book. Did I hate it? No. Did I love it? No. Yet, somehow, I’ve given it FIVE STARS. I’ll get to the why a bit later.

The Christie Affair (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) by Nina de Gramont is a novel of historical fiction, and please note that it is HEAVY on the fiction part of this story, which is loosely based upon the real life incident in the real life of real life author Agatha Christie. In 1926, after being told by her husband, the father of her only child (in real life a girl named Rosalind), Agatha disappears. She drives off in her own car (purchased with proceeds from book sales), leaving her child at the family home with the nanny. She is missing for eleven days. All of England is searching for the famous writer, tens of thousands of volunteers, over 1,000 police officers, planes flying overheard, all to no avail. Even the even more famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, joins in the search, enlisting the services of a spirit medium to try to track when Agatha’s spirit left her body.

When Agatha is found, in a hotel registered under the surname of her husband’s mistress, she claims that she has no recollection of what has happened. And, she never mentioned it again, not in her autobiography, not in any interview, not for the remaining fifty years of her life. It remains Agatha Christie’s biggest and most intriguing mystery.

So, what does Nina de Gramont do with this story? OMG!!! I’ll get to that in a minute.

I had a big craft project to do and an impending deadline for its completion, so I decided to read this book via audiobook narrated by Lucy Scott. I don’t have a lot of experience with audiobooks, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In my three days of sewing on my project, I absolutely zipped through this book. Listening to this tall tale, I stayed focused on my project, and for once, I had no major hiccups on my project!

In a quick survey of my books read in Goodreads, I’ve read over twenty books by Agatha Christie, about Agatha Christie, or featuring Agatha Christie. I recently read and reviewed Marie Benedict’s The Queens of Crime, of which Agatha Christie is one. So you have to understand that the storyline that Nina de Gramont created in this book was a total shock to me. The story is told in first person, in the voice of the mistress, in this book named Nan O’Dea (a slight departure from the name of the real mistress Nancy Odell). This seems like an odd choice to me, but I’m not a published author of a New York Times bestseller, so what do I know?

The twists and turns that occur in this novel—impossible to detail without spoiling the OMG moments near the end—are really imaginative. Are they believable? No, not all of them. Did it make me quit listening? Absolutely not. This is my conundrum. I found some of the plot points so unbelievable that it made me want to rate it lower; however, the originality and storytelling aspect was so compelling I had to give it five stars.

I almost feel like I would have loved this book much more had I never heard of Agatha Christie or her husband or his mistress or her mysterious disappearance. That way, the things I know to be true about one of my favorite authors of all times would not have had me going, “Wait, what?” while reading The Christie Affair. But, don’t let any of that stop you from going along for the wild ride that is this book!