Dedication

Dedication

For Agatha Christie

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

I am enormously grateful to the following people: the inimitable Peter Straus, who is to literary agenting what Poirot is to mystery-solving; Mathew and James Prichard, who have been so inspiring, kind, helpful and supportive throughout this whole process; the brilliant Hilary Strong, who is a joy both to work with and to have fun with; the wonderful teams at HarperCollins UK and US, especially Kate Elton and Natasha Hughes (for enthusiastic and incisive editorial input), David Brawn (for the same, and also for many conversations about dogs, and for fielding the odd cryptic, semi-hysterical phone call! As David handles literary estates, it’s rare that an author who isn’t dead gets to work with him, and all those not-dead authors are missing a treat, let me tell you.) Thanks to Louisa Joyner, who was so lovely and enthusiastic about this book in advance and who played a significant part in getting it off the ground. Thank you to Lou Swannell, Kathy Turtle, Jennifer Hart, Anne O’Brien, Heike Schüssler, Danielle Bartlett, Damon Greeney, Margaux Weisman, Kaitlin Harri, Josh Marwell, Charlie Redmayne, Virginia Stanley, Laura Di Giuseppe, Liate Stehlik, Kathryn Gordon, and all the other fantastic people who have been involved—you have all made this an amazingly wonderful experience. (There is no such thing as too many adjectives on an Acknowledgments page.) And thanks to Four Colman Getty, who did a brilliant job of marketing the book.

A special bursting-into-song kind of thank you, requiring its own paragraph, to the inspirational Dan Mallory, who has reminded me of everything I love about writing and books.

Thank you to Tamsen Harward for making a crucial plot suggestion just in time.

Hodder & Stoughton, who publish my psychological thrillers, have been exceptionally jolly and excited about my fleeting elopement with Poirot, and asked only that I return to Hodder Towers without a big swirly moustache. I am enormously grateful to them.

Thank you to everybody who has been lovely about this book on Twitter and in the real world—Jamie Bernthal and Scott Wallace Baker spring to mind particularly, and I am very grateful to both of them for welcoming me into the world of Agatha fandom.

1. Runaway Jennie

Runaway Jennie

“ALL’S I’M SAYING IS, I don’t like her,” the waitress with the flyaway hair whispered. It was a loud whisper, easily overheard by the solitary customer in Pleasant’s Coffee House. He wondered whether the “her” under discussion on this occasion was another waitress or a regular patron like himself.

“I don’t have to like her, do I? You want to think different, you feel free.”

“I thought she was nice enough,” said the shorter waitress with the round face, sounding less certain than she had a few moments ago.