Spider's Web

✍ Scribed by Christie, Agatha

• Publisher: Minotaur;St. Martin's Paperbacks
• Year: 2000;2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 85 KB
• Edition: St. Martin's pbk. ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Clarissa, the young wife of a foreign office diplomat, delights in tweaking the sensibilities of her more serious friends by playing a game she calls "supposing"--imagining a difficult situation and finding out how people would respond. But Clarissa's lighthearted games becomes deadly serious when she discovers the body of an unknown person in her own drawing room. If that weren't bad enough, her husband is on the way home with an important foreign politician. Clarissa decides to dispose of the body and persuades her three houseguests to help. But before she can get the corpse off the premises, a policeman knocks at her front door. Now Clarissa must keep the body hidden, convince the skeptical police inspector that there has been no murder, and, in the meantime, find out who has been murdered, why, and what the body is doing in her house...

From Publishers Weekly

Osborne completes his homage to Christie with this third and final adaptation of an original Christie play, following Black Coffee (1998) and The Unexpected Guest (1999). Though the play was written in 1954, the story suffers little from the passage of time, and aside from the static setting, reads well as a novel. Christie's exquisite timing and clever sleight-of-mind tricks are a delight, while Osborne has the good sense not to embroider the tale. A typical closed cast of characters occupies the temporary country home of Henry and Clarissa Hailsham-Brown: the seemingly scatterbrained Clarissa; her stepdaughter, Pippa; the odious Oliver Costello, who has married Pippa's mother; Sir Rowland Delahaye, Clarissa's godfather and a man of honor; an outspoken gardener; a butler; a cook; and Inspector Lord, the rather diffident policeman. When Clarissa discovers a body in the drawing room, she decides that it mustn't be found there. Her plans to dispose of the body are interrupted by the arrival of a rather diffident policeman, Inspector Lord, who has come to check out an anonymous tip that a murder has been committed. Christie's bag of tricks includes hidden doorways, secret drawers, French windows and concealed identitiesDall used to amusing effect. As with Osborne's previous novelizations, this is a welcome addition to the Christie canon and is sure to reach mystery bestseller lists. The cover, with a spider in a web against a green faux-marble background, is as catchy as they come. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This third and last of Christie's plays to be novelized by Osborne--following Black Coffee (1998) and The Unexpected Guest(1999)--betrays its origins in its crisp dialogue and smooth action. Twists, turns, and things that are not what they seem abound, of course, as Clarissa, the younger second wife of Henry Hailsham-Brown, amuses herself in deception and flirtation in their rented country home. However, when the current spouse of Henry's first wife, an odious sort, turns up dead at her very feet, Clarissa must be resourceful indeed. Her young stepdaughter hated and feared the dead man, and Henry himself is bringing home a diplomat on a secret mission, so the whole thing must be cleared up posthaste. Despite Clarissa's best efforts, the police show up, and a series of deceptions within deceptions foment a neat, exaggerated, and quite attractive puzzle. Another Christie on the bookshelf, huzzah. GraceAnne DeCandido
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