This master criminal/espionage plot is unabashedly a romance, while commenting wryly on the Perils of Pauline type of adventure. Anne is one of the most straightforwardly adventurous, practical and brave female characters you'll encounter in Christie, and it's great fun to watch where she'll end up. The romance gets a little "women want a strong man who tells them what to do", but then thankfully promptly undercuts that notion.As with many books written in the 1920s, the racial aspects are at the least uncomfortable - Africans are treated as benevolently childlike, or frighteningly Other, and are very much backdrop rather than characters of substantial presence.
