by Agatha Christie
The second Hercule Poirot novel. To explain its plot accurately would
take half an hour and a whiteboard, but briefly: the Belgian detective
and his aide Hastings are summoned to the house of M. Renauld, a
millionaire who fears for his life. They arrive too late, finding him
already dead, half-buried in an unfinished golf bunker, supposedly at
the hands of bearded foreign thugs, and possibly at the hands of a
jilted lover. But Poirot soon unearths not one, but two of the
principals are living under assumed names and have criminal pasts, while
the jilted lover may not have belonged to M. Renauld at all, and then
another corpse pops up.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit, as I did
its predecessor; Christie puts so much charm and wit into her tortuous,
labyrinthine plots filled with deception and red herrings that the joy
they bring makes one forgot the craziness of the coincidences and
cover-ups. I did roll my eyes at the depictions of the police other
than Poirot; I don’t mind Hastings being a besotted fool (and he
certainly is, from first page to last), but when the police dismiss what
is obviously evidence such as discarded clothes or the woman who
visited the crime scene; or when the doctor fails to realize the most
basic of forensic points (that a man was stabbed after death), it makes
Poirot’s cleverness merely the rationality of the not-stupid. Still,
nit-picking leaches the fun out of the mystery, and it is indeed quite
fun.
four stars
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