Postern of Fate

by Agatha Christie Book 5 in the Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries series.

First published 1973

Amazon

3.7(1,607)

In retirement, Tommy and Tuppence move into an old house and discover a coded message in a children’s book stating that Mary Jordan did not die naturally. Their search through books, garden features and local memory points toward espionage and a death concealed during the First World War.

The investigation connects the couple’s 1970s present with people who were children, servants or intelligence contacts decades earlier. Fragmentary and reflective, the novel is concerned with how houses preserve evidence and how national secrets become family stories, requiring the Beresfords to recover meaning from memories that are incomplete but not entirely lost.