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CHRISTIETOWN
by Susan Kandel
Harper, June 2007
280 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0061452173


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Cece Caruso loves fashion and adores mysteries. She is a writer of well-reviewed but little-selling biographies of people from the world of the written mystery. This time she is asked to write a small murder mystery play in order to advertise the newly built theme village of Christietown, a village built using the names and locations from Agatha Christie's life and writings.

A man who calls himself a distant relative of Agatha Christie has put the small town together. He hopes to sell all the homes in the town and in order to do so, he has invited Cece to write and put on a low-funded Miss Marple play in order to get Christietown some attention.

There is not much money for the production, so Cece has to use her friends and relatives to be the actors in her production, but there is plenty of energy in the group. Everyone is delighted to be in the play, so Cece hopes that things will go smoothly enough. The play and the rehearsals are going on at the same time as Cece is being hassled to finish her latest book, her daughter Annie is expecting her first child, and Cece is still trying to get herself together enough to plan her marriage to her LA cop fiancé Detective Peter Gambino.

Bumpy is a nice way to describe the production and on the opening night one member of the troupe, the one playing Miss Marple, suddenly goes missing. Sure enough, later on the woman is found dead in the business office. Because she feels responsible for the death, Cece decides that she must work to discover the reason for the murder and to bring the guilty to justice. But of course, all doesn't run smoothly as Cece finds that the politics of the location has a lot to do with the life or death of a new town.

In CHRISTIETOWN the readers will also find chapters that seem to be written by Agatha Christie herself. These are all about the famous missing days in Christie's life when she left her husband and it was reported was that she had been banged on the head and had suffered amnesia.

Cece is a bright and feisty main character, happily not at all a youngster, but a woman with a few years and experiences under her belt. Though she still can be won over with a vintage dress, Cece is a great lead character with a talent to solve crimes.

A worthwhile book showing a lot of respect for Agatha Christie and her writing and life, CHRISTIETOWN's a fine read.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, June 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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