In the Library
The Secret Adversary
Agatha Christie, 1922
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 29
- Length
- Length 75k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
Buchan's Edwardian thriller sends an ordinary man running across Britain after a secret that could change a war, with the same breathless pace and the same sense that anyone might be the enemy.
£1.99
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett also sends sharp-tongued partners after a missing prize through a ring of liars, but strips away every trace of cosiness and lets the cynicism win.
£1.99
About the book
The ship is going down, and a man presses an oilskin packet into an American girl's hands because women and children go first. That is the Lusitania, and those papers could one day bring down a government. In a London with no use for the soldiers and nurses it has just sent home, Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley meet outside Dover Street tube, both broke, and decide to hire themselves out as adventurers, willing to go anywhere and do anything. Before the day is out, someone takes them at their word. What follows is a chase after a vanished girl called Jane Finn and a mastermind known only as Mr Brown, who might be anyone in the room. The treasure is the pair at its heart: Tuppence, quick and gloriously cheeky; Tommy, slow, stubborn and much harder to fool than he looks. They bicker like two people already in love, and the book glows with the nerve of a generation that lost four years to a war and wants them back.