> HISTORICAL FICTION
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, by Marie Benedict (Sourcebooks)
In December 1926, up-and-coming doyenne of detective fiction, Agatha Christie went missing for 11 days. Her abandoned Morris Cowley was found near a small, dark spring-filled lake in Surrey, her fur coat left inside. Her disappearance sparked an unprecedented manhunt that involved over a thousand police officers, airplanes, and the specialist knowledge of fellow crime writers Dorothy Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Accounts from strangers of “sightings” eventually lead to her discovery. Claiming amnesia, Christie never disclosed her whereabouts.
Benedict has richly imagined what transpired throughout those days during which Christie reconciles herself to the facts of her broken marriage. Chapters alternate between the story of Agatha Miller meeting handsome pilot Archibald Christie in 1912 and a memoir written throughout 1926 in which Agatha plants clues to her disappearance
Find Me in Havana, by Serena Burdick (Park Row Books)
When she was only 9, Estelita Rodriguez (1928-1966) sang frequently in a Havana nightclub. By the time she was 15, she travelled with her mother to NYC to perform at the Copacabana. There she met singer Chu Chu Martinez and by 18 wed him and moved to Mexico City with their sixweek-old daughter, Nina, forced to abandon her musical career.
Intrepid and talented, Estelita leaves her husband and moves to L.A. with her mother and Nina where she signs a movie deal and works with John Wayne, Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson. The demands of the film industry force Estelita to send Nina to boarding school. In 1958, when Nina is home for the summer and experiences a trauma, she is kidnapped by her father.
Through the letters that Nina and Estelita write to each other we learn of the chase to extricate Nina from Mexico and the months that follow spent in Cuba during the height of the revolution. Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce, by Nuala O’Connor (Harper Perennial)
Galway-born, bold as brass Nora Barnacle, model for Molly Bloom in her husband’s “Ulysses,” narrates this biographical novel in which she tries to balance her intense desire for Jim with the perpetual anxiety of living in poverty, first as a couple, and then with their children.
It opens in June 1904 Dublin, on the sixteenth, the day Nora and Jim meet, a day he commemorates as Bloomsday when his epic is finally published by Sylvia Beach in 1922.
O’Connor’s vibrant prose — with knowing call backs to a whiff of lemon soap to set the plot unspooling, and the shameless, life-affirming, rhythmic and musical Joycean diction — enlivens Nora’s ongoing struggle to support the man who is her love, and also a bother to her heart and a sore conundrum to her mind.
The Invisible Woman, by Erika Robuck (Berkley)
In March 1944, Baltimore native Virginia Hall returns for a second clandestine mission in France, a price on her head by the Gestapo who hunted her in Lyon in 1942 when she was betrayed as a resistance operative, giving her the nickname la dame qui boite, the “limping lady,” because of her prosthetic leg. Originally hired by the SOE (Churchill’s Special Operations Executive) in 1941, and fluent in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, Hall is now working for US general “Wild Bill” Donovan and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) as a spy co-ordinating supply drops of arms and food to organize the Maquis in Brittany.
Robuck shines a light on the intrepid and singular Virginia Hall, too long in shadow.
Janet Somerville is the author of “Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949.”