A review by leventmolla
Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie

3.0

This is a very atypical Agatha Christie book. First of all, it is not a murder mystery at all. It is the story of government agencies in the UK tracking the disappearance of Mr. Betterton, a prominent scientist who has been involved in the design of some fission experiments. Her wife goes to Morocco on a holiday but the plane crashes and a lot of passengers are killed. Mrs. Hilary Craven is travelling to Paris, trying to get out of a depression she has gone into after her son died from meningitis and her husband left her. She buys some drugs and decides to kill herself, but is saved in time by Mr. Jessop, who is actually a government agent tracking the disappearance of Mr. Betterton and other prominent scientists. He offers Mrs. Craven an adventure. With her red hair, she looks like Mrs. Betterton. She would pretend that she is Mrs. Betterton and survived the plane crash. She would then possibly be contacted by those who are responsible for Mr. Betterton's disappearance and it would be possible to trace his whereabouts.

It looks like a suicidal plan, since the plot would be untangled when she would meet Mr. Betterton, but Hilary accepts the challenge, since she has nothing to lose.

It is an interesting book, probably because it is not a typical Murder mystery. It was published in 1954, the early periods of Cold War, just after the Rozenberg trials, thus the tone reflects that era. Not a masterpiece in the Cold War spy thrillers, but acceptable.