Mary Lou Johnson

Anna Leonowens, a proper Englishwoman, was an unlikley candidate to change the course of Siamese (Thai) history. A young widow and mother, her services were engaged in the 1860's by King Mongkut of Siam to help him communicate with foreign governments and be the tutor to his children and favored concubines. Stepping off the steamer from London, Anna found herself in an exotic land she could have only dreamed of lush landscape of mystic faiths and curious people, and king's palace bustling with royal pageantry, ancient custom, and harems. One of her pupils, the young prince Chulalongkorn, was particularly influenced by Leonowens and her Western ideals. He learned about Abraham Lincoln and the tenets of democracy from her, and years later he would become Siam's most progressive king. He guided the country's transformation from a feudal state to a modern society, abolshing slavery and making many other radical reforms.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie Yugoslavia

 

Murder is committed in one of the sleeping compartments on the IstanbulCalais coach of the famous Orient Express train; almost the entire action takes place in that coach and in the restaurant car following. Poirot is returning on the train from Syria (where he has just solved a crime for the French government), and when the train is forced to halt in Yugoslavia by a snowstorm just after the murder, Poirot is prevailed upon by the railway director, M. Bouc, to investigate. The murder victim is an American businessman named Ratchett. The suspects are an international collection of travellers: Mrs. Hubbard, a loquacious American; the Princess Dragomiroff, an exotic Russian travelling with her maid; the Count and Countess Andrenyi, Hungarian diplomat and wife; Mary Debenham, an English governess; the British Colonel Arbuthnot, returning from India; Greta Ohlsson, a Swedish missionary, and a few othersmany of whom are not what they seem. Poirot's final solution is among the most audacious of Christie's plots (in fact, he puts forward two theories and allows M. Bouc to choose between them).