The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie⁠ – Book Review

Genre

Mystery

The Plot

⁠Anne Beddingfeld longs for adventure. After her father’s death, she moves to London and witnesses a man falling onto the live track and dying. A doctor pronounces him dead and leaves in a hurry, dropping a note: “17.1 22 Kilmorden Castle”. Anne immediately dives into this mystery, hoping it will bring her the excitement she craves. That’s how she finds herself aboard the Kilmorden Castle, where her cabin is searched, and somebody tries to strangle her. What are they looking for?

❤️ What I liked about The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

🤩 Fun to read. This is another book that can be described as “not your typical Agatha Christie”. It’s not a murder mystery, more a thriller, a spy story. And, like all her books, it’s written amazingly well, with a great set of characters and a very vivid setting.

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👩 Anne. What a fun character she is! The first word I would use to describe her is stubborn and headstrong. She seems to bet quite ahead of her times: she is not worried about being a woman travelling alone, knows her strengths and is proud of what she learnt thanks to her dad. She dives into solving this mystery without realizing how dangerous it could be.

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✍️ The plot. This time I did not guess the identity of the bad guy. I wasn’t even close to guessing it. My mind was set on one character, but it turned out I was very much wrong!

I wasn’t so sure about

💌 Too much romance? The second part of the book, when Anne arrives in South Africa, seems a bit too focused on the romantic side of things than on solving the mystery.

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😱 Partner violence. I picked up a couple of dialogues that made me feel a bit uncomfortable… but, as usual, we have to keep in mind that this book was written almost a century ago. Who knows what future readers will think of the books published now?

To the score

⭐⭐⭐ 3.5/5 I read this book for the January #readchristie2022 challenge. As I said more than once already, I prefer Agatha Christie’s mysteries to her spy stories. But I enjoyed it anyway.