The Unexpected Guest

With over two billion books in print worldwide, Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, having penned more than one hundred works of fiction, drama, poetry and non-fiction. With THE UNEXPECTED GUEST, just as was so superbly done with her New York Times bestselling Black Coffee, author Charles Osborne adapts this brilliant Christie play into a most intriguing mystery novel. Along a mist-shrouded country road in South Wales on a chilly November evening, engineer Michael Starkwedder's car stands hopelessly stuck in a muddy ditch. Ambling up to the nearest house for help, Starkwedder gets no reply when he knocks on the French doors of the elegant, darkened home. With a push, the doors open, and inside he is witness to a startling scene: a man, slumped over dead in a wheelchair, and his lovely young wife standing nearby, with smoking gun in hand. Laura Warwick immediately confesses to the crime. But Starkwedder, a man intrigued by what lay beneath the surface, begins to uncover family ties and chilling motives as twisted as the backroads of rural Wales -- and soon discovers that in this seemingly open-and-shut case, nothing is what it appears to be...

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 1890 - 1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer and playwright. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap and six romances under the name Mary Westmacott. In 1971 she was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her contributions to literature.