The Man in the Brown Suit

I liked this one, actually. And quite a bit.

First off, you have your standard-issue feisty heroine, Anne Beddington. Then you have stolen diamonds, murder attempts, a trip from England to South Africa, mistaken identity, bizarre military dudes and a wealthy lady of leisure.

Anne, our protagonist, gets involved in the intrigue when she is hanging out in a train station and thinks a man is looking at her in horror. He collapses, is checked on by another man, and pronounced dead. Anne realizes this other man was probably the one being looked at by the dead man, so she follows him and picks up a piece of paper he drops with a curious inscription. Being recently orphaned, nearly penniless and with an appetite for adventure, Anne decides she'll follow the clues (which lead her to the ship, which is on its way to South Africa, after a long digression into some other real estate matters of the dead man) and see just what is going on.

On the ship, Anne finagles her way into a particular cabin and, at a seemingly appointed time, a man knocks on her door. He's stabbed, and he's not particularly nice to her. Of course, this means they must eventually fall in love. He's not badly hurt, but reader, his head, his head is not right.

Anne also hooks up with Mrs. Suzanne Blair, who takes long vacations without Mr. Blair and, seemingly, with Colonel Race, who is a recurring Christie character. Blair is kind of hilarious, like the Samantha of South Africa, but without the affairs.

At any rate, there are a lot of twists and turns, my favorite being the one where Anne falls off a cliff and is knocked unconscious for "about a month" during which time the comely man and a "hideous" native woman attend her. Yes, this is Christie, yes, she's not one for the natives, yes yes and yes, it's racist. Somehow Anne doesn't die of starvation or feel embarrassed about having had bodily functions in a hut for this man to see (well, let's be honest, it's probably the local woman's job to deal with that).

The two naturally fall madly in love, find the diamonds, turn down a huge inheritance to live in the jungle forevermore, and end scene.

The most interesting thing about this book is that it reads kind of like a video game. There are set puzzles that must be solved (by the reader and characters) before the next puzzle, and then there's sort of a reveal of a puzzle you didn't expect at the end. Linear? Yes. But kind of fun and things click into place instead of being all confusing until the end.