With The Mysterious Affair at Styles, we watch Poirot - the fastidious, logical, and experienced moustache-twirling Belgian - conduct a murder investigation at a rural estate. The book contains familiar themes - suspicious relatives and hangers-on, class differences, the interspersing of clues and red herrings, and the classic conclusion, wherein the detective identifies the criminal amidst a room full of suspects. The Secret Adversary, by contrast, proceeds quite differently. Tommy and Tuppence, inexperienced as investigators, fall into the detective game and fumble their way through their first case using equal parts boldness and blind luck. While they are certainly ingenious and capable of logic, Tommy and Tuppence differ from Poirot in almost every way - they are quite young and react to circumstances rather than anticipate them. With the later addition of quietly tenacious Jane Marple, Agatha Christie created some of fiction's most intriguing detectives. --Features: Original Cover Art by Abigail Larson, Contextual Introduction, Annotations, and Study Questions for classroom or book club use.