Book Review: A Talent For Murder, by Andrew Wilson

Available now in bookshops nationwide.

The author has merged so well with Agatha Christie the novel reads as grippingly as any of her works. Meticulously researched, he adopts Ms Christie’s persona in this tale of her famed missing eleven days.

Anxiety and panic attacks fill Mrs Christie as she relates the events of what is readily plausible in that time and in her world of crime novels.

Wilson teases us with characters she meets; we want to keep reading to know them, to know more about them. We are in suspense as we read on and learn more. How each character involves with and revolves around each other, and the plot, is breath-holding – in the sense of building our feelings of foreboding, and character empathy.

This book was so well written I devoted two evenings to completing it. Christie, as character, reads people, actions and settings, and records them in such detail that it is easy to believe this story is truth. She shares her emotions – bereavement, stress, loss, anger, desperation – in reasoned detail. Her voice builds reader empathy

Wilson’s re-creation of Christie’s work is exceptional; and, what good news – he is working on the next Agatha Christie Adventure, A Different Kind of Evil.

Reviewed by Lynne McAnulty-Street

A Talent For Murder
by Andrew Wilson
Published by Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9781471148224
eBook: 9781471148231

A New Zealander writes her way to meet Agatha Christie’s grandchild in London

Media Release from HarperCollins NZ, Monday 10 March 2014

Tauranga resident Anna Killick has written her way to meeting Agatha Christie’s only grandchild, Mathew Prichard at an exclusive literary dinner in London.

Killick, who lives in Tauranga, entered the Write Your Own Christie competition hosted on the official Agatha Christie website, www.agathachristie.com. The competition is being run over nine months with writers from around the world helping to write a new detective story using the opening scenes from the great crime writer’s novel A Murder is Announced as the starting point. Beginning with an invitation to complete chapter one, each month the challenge is set to write the next chapter in the story.  Killick won chapter five of the competition and her entry was posted on the website.

The competition is being judged by Mathew Prichard who has been involved in the publishing and promotion of Christie’s books since the 1960s, David Brawn who has been Agatha Christie’s publisher at HarperCollins UK for the last 18 years, and also Daniel Mallory who works primarily with thrillers and crime fiction at HarperCollins US.

As one of the monthly winners Annie Killick’s chapter has been posted to the website and she has accepted her invitation to the literary dinner in London on date yet to be confirmed.

http://www.agathachristie.com/write-your-own-christie/