What I read on my summer vacation ~ Win a copy of a classic mystery!

by Mary Ellis


Authors are first and foremost readers. Most of use fit as much pleasure reading into a summer vacation as we possibly can. Away from of the daily word-count on our current manuscript and apart (more-or-less) from the demands of email and social media, I love crawling into a hammock, plopping into a beach chair, squeezing into an airplane seat or my favorite, curling up on a train with a good book. When I’m home I usually read the fast-paced suspense novels written by my friends, many of whom are fellow Suspense Sisters. But on vacation, I love to take along one of the classics. During my recent trip to the England, Spain and France, I chose Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. 

Miss Christie, who died in 1976, is the most widely published author of all time, out-sold only by the Holy Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. Miss Christie, dubbed the Queen of Mystery, created Miss Marple and the amusing, yet relentless Belgian investigator Hercule Poirot in a phenomenal twenty-nine book series. Here is a blurb of Death on the Nile: 

Beloved detective Hercule Poirot embarks on a journey to Egypt in one of Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries, Death on the Nile. The tranquility of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything . . . until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger." Yet in this exotic setting nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Leave me a comment about your favorite type of vacation read for a chance to win a brand new copy of Death on the Nile. Please leave your email address and sorry, US only. Happy reading this summer!