rushed Today I finished They Came to Baghdad, which technically means I have completed the R.I.P. Challenge for this year, but of course I intend to go on and see how far I'll get with my list.
As I had indeed correctly remembered, this is one of Agatha Christie's spy novels. Like I stated before, I always have great difficulty comprehending spy stories. Whether this is due to missing a necessary gene or simply not having the right amount of brain cells I do not know.Fact is I find all Christie's spy novels — fortunately she did not write many — rather silly with improbable plots. In this case it's about a group contriving to establish a new world order; not that strange, seeing that They Came to Baghdad was first published in 1951, during the Cold War.
The fact that this genre isn't for me is not the book's (or the author's) fault, but something else I didn't like about it, and which nearly made me give up several times, is that it took one hundred pages before things finally started moving. Since the book only totals 221 pages, that is a very long preamble.
That said, some of the characters were amusing. I particularly liked the archaeologist, who turned out to be a little more observant than everyone was led to believe.
1/5 (yay! some shelf space freed up!)
BTW, looking for the cover of this particular edition online I came across Delicious Death, a wonderful website dedicated to Agatha Christie's works and containing a large collection of covers from all over the world.