 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book rated below 3 stars on Goodreads.
Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie. Some of these Popsugar categories are head-scratchers. In addition to this category, there's one for "a book you've always avoided reading." I get that part of the challenge is to expand your horizons, but it seems weird to choose books that I'm not expecting to like. I did like this one, but in a campy, so-bad-it's-good way. Agatha Christie is the queen of mysteries because she knows where she's going, and all the clues come together to give us a satisfying and believable (even if wildly improbable) conclusion. With spy novels, however, she just gives us a shadowy enemy, and the story wobbles around without ever really going anywhere. (I had the same problem with The Big Four, but at least that one had Poirot.) I'm going to include spoilers, but not the identity of the villain, because it really doesn't matter. Passenger to Frankfurt starts with a mysterious woman approaching a British diplomat in an airport. She tells him that her life is in danger. Noting that they have similar faces, she asks that he hand over his wallet, passport, and bulky cloak, so she can impersonate him. How will he get home? No problem, she'll put something in his drink, and he can tell the authorities he was drugged and robbed. He says sure, why not. After his return to England, they have a couple of furtive meetings (pass each other in the crowd, pretending not to know each other while she slips him a note, etc). But then they meet at a party, with her using her real name, so the secret meetings simply added risk for no discernable reason. There's a subplot where it's claimed that Hitler survived the bunker, by a scheme too harebrained for me to describe, and escaped to South America and fathered a son to be the new Aryan champion. Mercifully, this gets debunked. Then the book veers to a whole other plot, in which a scientist has created something called Benvo, which causes people to want to make others happy. The inventor isn't sure anyone should have it, but the good guys want it, and so do the bad guys, helpfully identified in a Venn diagram that... ...you know, it really doesn't matter. Just suspend your disbelief and go with it.
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