Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

While I was excited about reading another Poirot mystery, this book turned out to be a disappointment. The underlying problem is that the author missed the fundamental idea and appeal of Agatha Christie's stories, specifically the ones featuring Poirot. The superficial details are faithfully reproduced: Poirot's verbal tics, his obsession with order and detail, the substitute for Captain Hastings, the interbellum London setting, etc. What's missing is the talent Christie had that distinguishes her from other mystery authors: the ability to create and develop a clever plot. Consider, in constrast, works like "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", "Lord Edgware Dies," "Peril at End House," "The ABC Murders," "Evil Under the Sun," etc. The solutions to Christie's mysteries were always brilliant and elegant but fair to the reader. The mystery in Hannah's novel is a mess. It's unnecessarily complicated, it involves too many uninteresting characters, it requires no insight or trick to solve, and it's unsatisfying after it's revealed. Although all the superficial details are there, this new novel fails completely to capture the mood of the original. It's not a drawing-room or village murder, or even a locked-room mystery or murder-in-retrospect. If anything, it's a modern crime thriller or even something like a police procedural (with a private investigator rather than a police officer) disguised as an older novel. We watch Poirot conduct an investigation, interrogate forgettable witnesses, and gradually piece together a bloated, convoluted mystery. The novel lacks the cleverness of Christie's work and her ingenious solutions, and adding Poirot to an otherwise forgettable modern thriller isn't enough to redeem it.