Having read many Agatha Christie novels and never having read a biography of the author, I thoroughly enjoyed Lucy Worsley’s comprehensive look at Christie’s life and work. Worsley explores all the facets of Christie’s unique role as a “authoress” of the early 20th-century scorned as middlebrow or even lowbrow for much of her career. These labels seemed to make little difference to the author, since her drive to write and ambition to play with new ideas and new problems in detective fiction kept her going, no matter what anyone said. And that passion built an empire of dedicated readers (if not always the income that it should have reflected). Worsley skillfully recreates the many aspects of Christie’s life: the writer, the archaeologist, the wife and mother, the businesswoman, the friend, and surrogate mother to many. She faced two wars, a seeming nervous breakdown and divorce, a second very successful marriage to a much younger man, a culture undergoing massive change, a publishing industry often actively hostile to women writers, and her own increasing infirmity with age. Many of these these themes found their way into her books, giving them staying power. Yet she also understood the separation between work and life, especially as her troublesome game grew. “You can’t write your fate. Your fates comes to you,” she wrote in her autobiography. “But you can do what you like with the characters you create” (338).