"The Man in the Brown Suite"

[fiefoe]

First there was a TV movie based on this book starring the girl from "Remington Steele", then there was a book sale at our college -- and this slim volume has been on my bookcase ever since. Now that I've just re-read it, I'd be hard pressed to say why I liked the book so much back then. Maybe I had a thing for genial villains. Maybe it's because there's more romance in this book than one would expect from Agatha Christie. The romance is sort of in the Barbara Cartland vein -- the heroine is a plucky orphan and willing to die for her twice-encountered lover, to say nothing of living on an island and raising brown children with him.

The femme fatale in the book is a Russian ballet dancer and I kept getting distracted imagining her as that sheltered ballerina in "Black Swan". It didn't jive at all!

P.S.: Mystery novels don't make good bedtime reading for me. Between putting it down and picking it up, I keep losing the plot and misplacing the red herrings.