Partners in Crime

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have settled into marriage, but not into boredom: she craves romance, danger, and excitement, while he answers her with dry humor and cautious common sense. Their bantering domestic life takes a sharper turn when Mr. Carter, a mysterious government man, appears with a proposal that matches their appetite for intrigue. He asks them to revive a failing detective agency as cover for covert work, beginning with a search for coded correspondence linked to "16." Once installed in Bloomsbury, they discover that real inquiry is less glamorous than fiction, yet Tuppence is determined to make the business lively. Their first cases mix comedy with suspense. A nervous young man, Lawrence St. Vincent, seeks help finding Janet, the hat-shop girl he loves, and Tuppence quickly turns the office into a scene of bustling professionalism. The "missing" woman is soon revealed to be part of a scheme to force a proposal and promote the agency, a deception Tommy dislikes but Tuppence defends with characteristic nerve. Soon afterward, a murder at Mrs. Honeycott's home draws them into darker territory, where Tommy's careful reasoning exposes how a killer may have relied on a mistaken assumption. The stakes rise again when Inspector Marriot recruits them to infiltrate a counterfeit-note ring spreading forged Treasury notes through fashionable society, gambling circles, and the orbit of the elusive Major Laidlaw.