Sparkling Cyanide

Fülszöveg

About this book
SPARKLING CYANIDE is Vintage' Christie—an admirable specimen of the author's virtuosity and skill in construction, plot, and characterisation. In an article on Agatha Christie in a recent Detective Fiction section of The Times Literary Supplement (February 1955), C. H. B. Kitchin said: "Of all her books, I think Sparkling Cyanide is the one which I should take with me to a desert island; for I find in it a seriousness and a psychological insight unparalleled in the author's other works." Rosemary Barton has been dead for nearly a year before the story opens. But she lives on in the minds of six people: Iris, her sister; George, her husband; Ruth, her husband's secretary; Stephen Farraday, her lover; Sandra Farra-day, his wife; and Anthony Browne, her mysterious friend. Each of them has a secret reason for remembering. Did Rosemary commit suicide ? Or was she murdered ? She died at an evening party at a luxurious London restaurant. A year later a second party takes... Tovább

Fülszöveg

About this book
SPARKLING CYANIDE is Vintage' Christie—an admirable specimen of the author's virtuosity and skill in construction, plot, and characterisation. In an article on Agatha Christie in a recent Detective Fiction section of The Times Literary Supplement (February 1955), C. H. B. Kitchin said: "Of all her books, I think Sparkling Cyanide is the one which I should take with me to a desert island; for I find in it a seriousness and a psychological insight unparalleled in the author's other works." Rosemary Barton has been dead for nearly a year before the story opens. But she lives on in the minds of six people: Iris, her sister; George, her husband; Ruth, her husband's secretary; Stephen Farraday, her lover; Sandra Farra-day, his wife; and Anthony Browne, her mysterious friend. Each of them has a secret reason for remembering. Did Rosemary commit suicide ? Or was she murdered ? She died at an evening party at a luxurious London restaurant. A year later a second party takes place. There is a bowl of rosemary in the centre of the table, and round it sit the same six people—with an empty chair to mark Rosemary's place. Everyone is nervous, afraid, waiting for something to happen. And something does happen! The 'investigator' in this detective story is Colonel Race, who appeared in The Man in the Brown Suit (also a PAN Book).
' Agatha Christie has now written between fifty and sixty detective stories. Her technique is superb; she never cheats, though she admits that she sometimes says "things that can be taken two ways". The wife of a distinguished archaeologist (Professor Max Mallowan of London University), she assists him in his excavations in Iraq, where he has made remarkable discoveries. She lives mainly in South Devon^' in a Georgian house overlooking the River Dart. As a dramatist she has written several highly successful thriller plays. Vissza