
I’m a fan of Christie in general but hadn’t read this one before. I really only picked it up because I was looking for new books and noticed this going for free on Kindle. I enjoyed it all the way through, as Christie does her usual whodunnit thing, with Poirot being wonderfully Poirot. The setting is also classically Christie, in a small English village, with a coterie of elderly spinsters running the local gossip network in an efficient and delightful way. Poirot laments the missing Captain Hastings (who has apparently moved to Argentina) several times throughout the book to his substitute, the village doctor, James Sheppard, who narrates the book.
And then we have that twist! Without dropping any spoilers, I was completely floored and did not see that coming. There’s a lot of layers of misdirection going on here and I thought it worked really well. I’d like to reread it at some point to see how it reads knowing the resolution. The end was interesting, being reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express, with Poirot foregoing the legal process in favour of his own conscience. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. But it’s an excellent whodunnit with a great cast of characters and a twist I’ll be thinking about for days to come.