Abandoned by user

I need a book with a female main character, so I decided to reread Murder in Mesopotamia, which is narrated by Nurse Amy Leatheran:

"Dr. Leidner saw a woman of thirty-five, of erect, confident bearing. He saw a good-humoured face with slightly prominent blue eyes and glossy brown hair. She looked, he thought, just what a hospital nurse for a nervous case ought to look. Cheerful, robust, shrewd and matter-of-fact. Nurse Leatheran, he thought, would do."

Nurse Leatheran has just been engaged by Dr. Leidner to come out to his archeological dig and tend to his wife, Louise Leidner (dubbed Lovely Louise by her admirers. And her non-admirers). There's something not quite right at the dig, as described in this passage:

"Yes, individually they are all pleasant people. But somehow or other, I may have been fanciful, but the last time I went to see them I got a queer impression of something being wrong. I don’t know what it was exactly . . . Nobody seemed quite natural. There was a queer atmosphere of tension. I can explain best what I mean by saying that they all passed the butter to each other too politely.”

This is a wonderfully descriptive explanation of the tension.

My recollection of the adaptation is that it isn't one of the better ones, but the setting is wonderful:

While the book takes place at a dig in, I believe, Iraq, the adaptation was filmed at a dig in Tunisia.