«The 8:55 to Baghdad» by Andrew Eames

With her marriage to her first husband, Archie Christie, over, she decided to take a much needed holiday; the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party with a couple who had just returned from Iraq changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory.

Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tells a riveting tale and reveals fascinating and little-known details en route in this exotic chapter in the life of Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad - a journey much more difficult to make in 2002 with the political unrest in the Middle East and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1928 - becomes ineluctably intertwined with Agatha's, and the people he meets could have stepped out of a mystery novel.

Fans of Agatha Christie will delight in Eames' description of the places and events that appeared in and influenced her fiction - and armchair travelers will thrill in the exotica of the journey itself.