How long does it take to read By the Pricking of My Thumbs?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie takes about 4 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 4 of Tommy and Tuppence
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About 4 hours 38 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1968. 253 pages, about 69,575 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 38 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 84 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"By the pricking of my thumbs,Something wicked this way comes."William Shakespeare – Macbeth (Act IV, Scene 1)When visiting Tommy's Aunt Ada in her nursing home, Tuppence encounters some odd residents, Mrs Lancaster, being the strangest of them all. Her incessant reference to 'something behind the fireplace' and a 'poor child' seems at first the incoherent ramblings of an elderly woman, though when Aunt Ada sadly passes away, a painting left to Tommy in her will leads the duo on a dangerous adventure where they finally discover exactly what Mrs Lancaster was talking about.Published in 1968, the title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The novel marks the return of Tommy and Tuppence after nearly three decades of silence. Unlike Christie's other recurring characters, the detectives have aged in accordance with time. Tommy is now over seventy, and Tuppence is sixty-six. Although not in the original novel Geraldine McEwan appears as Miss Marple in ITV's 2006 episode.
Subjects: Fiction, Married people, Mystery, Private investigators, Tommy Beresford (Fictitious character), England, fiction
