N or M?

During World War II, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford follow an obscure clue to a small English seaside town where a Nazi mastermind is recruiting Englishmen to help their cause. But who at the hotel is the mastermind? When a young child is kidnapped, Tommy and Tuppence believe they're on the right track, but are they? This riveting thriller is Christie at her best. It's a noteworthy for the political slant she includes, because that's not terribly common for her books. It constantly amazes me the amount of pertinent details Christie includes for the readers. Some are red herrings, and some are decisive. Agatha Christie was certainly the best.

i have been borrowing a couple of her books from the library after a long hiatus of 5-6 years. n or m is my first introduction to tommy and tuppence, and i must say they are a light-hearted, action-oriented departure from christie's other investigators, who give the impression of spending a lot of time in situ, whether at the murder scenes or comtemplating the case. christie veers from teh pack in her stubborn regard for the facts and teh circumstances; i have never done any professional spying, but i imagine if i did that i could take a few hints from her detailed analysis of how her characters think and act. so many detectives in detective novels strike you as so ordinary - some are not even very smart - but in this book you see the true complexity of wartime counter-espionage come to life, all the more frightening because it lurks beneath a veneer of everyday monotony. i love how she injects obscure words now and then...reminds you of a time when people didn't just use er..awesome as an umbrella expression for pleasure!

Normally Agatha Christie chooses to focus on the mysteries and not really concentrate on political and social events of that period; consequently her characters sometimes seem to be living in a vaccuum, removed from all that is happening around them. What makes "N or M?" unusual is that Christie chose to focus on WWII and what was happening in England at that time. Tommy and Tuppence who are living quietly in London suddenly find their routine interrupted when Tommy is called away on a secret assignment to try and find Hitler's most dangerous agent who has infiltrated England in advance of a planned attack by the Nazis. Of course, Tuppence who refuses to be left out of anything, follows him and actively helps him while posing as a garrulous widow. The book is more powerful than most because of the very real sense of menace that Christie creates and the feeling of evil lurking in the air. Wingding suspense and a knock-out ending - the only flaw was the focus on romance. Normally, it is nice to have a romantic attachment develop in Christie's books as they provide a nice relief to the mystery, but in this case I thought she should have concentrated only on the mystery; romance is almost superfluous in such a setting. It's interesting to think that while Tommy and Tuppence never actually existed, there may have been characters like them - ordinary people who possessed above-average intelligence who were picked to lead dangerous spy missions and who succeeded precisely because they were so ordinary and therefore not what the enemy was expecting.

I am rapidly running out of superlatives to describe this book and all other books written by this sensational author. The book is extremely hard to put down because Agatha Christie is, to put it simply, the best crime-fiction novelist there ever will be. I am in wraptures over this book. Sensational with a bizarre ending.

This was my first Agatha Christie book, and it is definetely on of my favorites! The plot is excellent, and it is a must for everyone!