A bit rambling and confusing. The only interesting characters were great Aunt Matilda and Sir Stafford Nye, who bears a striking resemblance to Dorothy Sayers' "Sir Peter Whimsey".
The story is a spy thriller involving an international cabal aimed at reviving Nazism but at its heart a vehicle for Christie to complain about the state of the world and problems with the youth of the 1960s.
The ending was very confusing... I think the plan was to drug the world into benevolence. I would only recommend this to Christie completists. ( )

Summary: Sir Stafford Nye helps a woman in the Frankfurt airport by giving her his cloak, passport, and boarding ticket to England and finds himself caught up in a global plot.

Sir Stafford Nye is a middle aged diplomat on his way home from Malaya when approached by a woman claiming that the re-routing of her flight jeopardizes her life, and asks that Nye help her by giving her his cloak, passport and boarding ticket. To make it all seem plausible, she says she will drug his beer while he leaves behind the cloak with passport and boarding ticket to step away for a moment. When he returns, they are gone, he drinks his beer and is eventually wakened, holding the stuffed Panda he had purchased for his niece, Sybil. Panda will return!

He treats it as a strange embarrassment until a colleague in security tells him he saved Mary Ann, an important agent who is variously known as Daphne Theodofanous and Countess Renata Zerkowski. When his passport is returned, he places a “personal” and ends up meeting her at the opera Siegfried, where she leaves a program with an important clue. Before he knows it, he is involved with her in an espionage plot designed to thwart the rise of a fascist organization sowing mayhem in the world led by a child purportedly sired by Hitler, but masterminded by an obese Bavarian countess.

Throughout, Nye tries to understand what is his part. He also learns rule number one in espionage–trust no one. Indeed, a traitor has infiltrated the intelligence organization directing “Mary Ann’s” efforts. At times, we wonder if Mary Ann is to be trusted.

Indeed, it was puzzling to me what role Nye plays beyond his initial unusual act of trust, other than his connection to his Aunt Mathilda who actually seems to have more to do with the denouement than Nye.

It’s an odd story, implausible at a number of points. The redeeming element is the mysterious Mary Ann. This was written when Christie had turned eighty and was the last of her spy stories. Perhaps the other element of the story is Christie’s prescient appreciation of the compelling attraction of fascism. Few would have credited this in 1970, when the horrors of fascism were still fresh. That aspect of this work is, sadly, far more plausible fifty years later. ( )

This was the oddest Christie novel I have encountered so far, more along the lines of Bellamy's [b:Looking Backward|40010967|Looking Backward|Edward Bellamy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1525142287s/40010967.jpg|61962565] or Sinclair's [b:It Can't Happen Here|11371|It Can't Happen Here|Sinclair Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388361997s/11371.jpg|1296784], rather than her usual murder mystery. I liked some of what she did with this story, but it felt a lot less polished and natural than I would have expected. In this book, a man gets drawn into a plot to cause mass revolution worldwide, or perhaps to thwart such revolutions, depending on what side his new lady friend is working for. The story centers on the Nazis, and many of the characters seem almost pro-Nazi. The overall message seemed almost that the Nazis were on the right track and were just thinking too small. ( )

Dreadful ( )

A minor diplomat is recruited to help in fight against an international plot to destroy governments. More of a spy thriller than a traditional mystery.