I am starting my Christie murder mystery read! I watched the recent adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, which I went into unspoiled, and it made me want to read and watch her other very famous works before I managed to learn too much!
I began with this one, because while I didn't know the particulars or the 'solution,' I had a general sort of cultural osmosis about this story. I knew that it began with ten people isolated together, and that one by one they began dying. However, it turns out the setting and overall setup adds a lot! Ten people who are mostly strangers, alone together in a house on a small island off the southern coast of England, with checkered pasts to say the least.
Mystery novels have never been my genre, but I have to say that reading this made me really understand the appeal. It was extremely nice to be able to read a book in one sitting that gave me all of the intrigue that I could want, and also provided the answer. I don't read books with the aim of figuring out the secret, and even if I had tried I don't think I could have figured it all out, but I did really enjoy how well it all fit together in the end. It's not a perfect book -- it has all of the class and race issues you might expect from a book written by an Englishwoman in the 1930s, with some casual antisemitism that caught me a bit off-guard right off the bat -- but I still really enjoyed it.
Grade: B
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