Victoria Jones, an unsettled young woman, is bouncing from job to job in London. After getting fired for making fun of her boss, she meets Edward Goring, who chats to her about his upcoming trip to Baghdad. After he has left, Victoria promptly decides she has fallen in love with him and decides to follow him to Baghdad. But how?

Eventually finding a way to get there, Victoria is determined to track Edward down, In the meantime, however, she discovers a dying British secret agent in her hotel room, who, as they do, leaves her a dying message – “Lucifer, Basra, Lefarge”. Victoria finds herself at the centre of a plot to bring down the current world order – can she possibly save the world?

I’ve not read every book by Agatha Christie. There, I’ve said it. So I thought it was about time I filled in the gaps with this one. It’s mostly the stand alone novels that I haven’t read and this is one of them. And… it’s okay, I suppose.

Now I know this isn’t much of a mystery, the villain being Captain Obvious, despite Captain Obvious’ central scheme having so many things wrong with it, it should bever have even come close to working. But the issue for me was that Victoria was just being swept along by the events rather than doing much to figure out what was going on. There are other, maler, characters to do that for her, and while there are a couple of nice ideas here – why someone dyes Victoria’s hair blonde, for example – but all in all, it’s just event, event, event, conclusion.

That sounds like I didn’t enjoy it – it’s perfectly fine and passed the time better than some recent reads. But it’s nowhere close to her best work.