December 1926: A young Agatha Christie, having just written her most celebrated novel and facing the prospect of a painful divorce, encounters a blackmailer who hopes to use the mystery maven's expert knowledge of crimes to commit a murder. Deftly blending fiction with the true story of Christie's mysterious eleven-day disappearance, A Talent for Murder is a thriller that recalls the films of Alfred Hitchcock as well as Christie's classic mysteries, throwing in subtle nods to some of her most obscure works. Much of the joy of this series comes from the extraordinary amount of research Andrew Wilson has done into Christie's life and times, and the care with which he conjures the past. The subsequent novels in this series are more traditional whodunits, in which the fictional Christie becomes an itinerant crime solver, visiting exotic locales—the Canary Islands, the deserts of Mesopotamia, and Scotland's picturesque Isle of Skye—and squaring off against common thieves and criminal conspirators. But all retain the first book's simplicity of language, loving evocation of the interwar settings, and willingness to dispatch even sympathetic characters with ruthless efficiency.