Agatha Christie: The Biography is a mildly overblown account of a life which was slightly less interesting than the author wanted it to be. It reads more like a genteel domestic saga than a penetrating piece of investigative biography, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I became increasingly irritated, though, with the amount of what I suppose could be called poetic license but which I might instead call “making things up”. At one point we are told that Agatha was “far more beautiful than is apparent from photographs”, and given that the author isn’t much older than me, I found myself thinking but how do you know?