Wanda McCaddon
A must-read for fans of stories from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, The Secret Adversary is Agatha Christie at her finest. In the midst of spinning an engrossing tale of adventure and international intrigue, Christie uses the novel to introduce the characters Tommy and Tuppence, both of whom figure in many of her books and short stories.
Fanny Price is born to a poor family, but is sent to her mother's rich relations to be brought up with her cousins. There she is treated as an inferior by all except her cousin Edmund, whose kindness towards her earns him her steadfast love. Fanny is quiet and obedient and does not come into her own until her elder cousins leave the estate following a scandalous play put on in their father's absence. Fanny's loyalty and love is tested by the beautiful
...Daniel Deronda meets the beautiful, extravagant Gwendolen in Germany and witnesses her great gambling losses which contribute to her family's bankruptcy. He then intervenes when she means to pawn her necklace, and the story splits, to narrate their two separate histories.
Eliot's only novel set in her contemporary Victorian society, Daniel Deronda was a controversial work of moral and social questioning, which explored Jewish Zionism and
...Unlike quite a number of people, Agatha has not given up on Christmas. To have the perfect Christmas had been a childhood dream while surviving a rough upbringing in a Birmingham slum. Holly berries glistened, snow fell gently outside, and inside, all was Dickensian jollity. And in her dreams, James Lacey kissed her under the mistletoe, and like a middle-aged sleeping beauty, she would awake to passion once more.
Agatha Raisin is bored. Her
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