"In 1928, Agatha Christie - the world's most widely read author - was a thirty-something single mother. At the end of her fourteen-year marriage to first husband Archie Christie, she had decided to take a much-needed holiday - the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party, with a couple who had just returned from Iraq, changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory." Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tells a riveting tale, en route to revealing fascinating and little-known details in this exotic chapter in the life of Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad - a journey much more difficult to make in 2002, with the political unrest in the Middle East and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1928 - becomes inextricably intertwined with Agatha's, and the characters he meets seem like they could have stepped out of a mystery novel.
