The Unexpected Guest: Travels in Afghanistan (Miss Marple Mysteries)

by Agatha Christie

Charles Osborne

Lost in the fog, a stranger seeks refuge in a nearby house only to find a man shot dead and his wife standing over him with a smoking gun. But the wife's confession is anything but convincing and the unexpected guest decides to help. Remarkably, the police clues point to a man who died two years previously, but as the ghosts of the past begin to emerge, a tangled web of lies reveals family secrets and chilling motives, where the real murderer turns out to be the greatest mystery of all.

• ISBN10: 0312975120
• ISBN13: 9780312975128
• Publish Date: 15 September 2000 (first published 7 March 1998)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 February 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St. Martin's Press
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

The Unexpected Guest is another play by Agatha Christie that was adapted as a novel Charles Osborne - so in short, it is not that great.

Of course I am peeved that I ended up with this book because it was advertised as an Agatha Christie novel, and it is not, but I am also astounded Osborne got to write several novelisations at all, and all of them on commission by Christie's estate!

He has no feel for Christie's characters.

While I can see that the setting in this novel is a typical Christie country house mystery, the main character of Laura Warwick does not strike me as a Christie woman at all.

But maybe I'm just peeved that Audible did not make it clear that this was an Osborne novel.