The Secret Adversary

The war is over, but for two young people in London, the real adventure is just beginning. Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley, both short on money and long on restlessness, reunite by chance and make a laughing matter of their desperation: they place an advertisement offering themselves as 'The Young Adventurers, Ltd.' : willing to do anything from finding lost dogs to thwarting spies. They hardly expect the ad to work. It does. Their first client needs them to find a missing American girl named Jane Finn, who vanished with crucial documents that could destabilize Europe. As Tommy and Tuppence dig deeper, they tumble into a world of forged passports, Russian counts, society beauties with dangerous secrets, and a shadowy mastermind called only 'Mr. Brown' : a criminal genius who seems to be three steps ahead of everyone. The mystery winds through the wreckage of the Lusitania, an amnesia patient, an American millionaire hunting for his cousin, and a series of increasingly lethal set pieces across England. What begins as a lark becomes a matter of life and death, and somewhere in the chaos, two partners become something more. Christie would return to this winning pair four more times, but this is where the spark catches.