Book: Closed Casket
Author: Sophie Hannah
Pages: 384
Read: The paperback edition featured here; You can read the first few pages of the book by clicking on 'Preview' below as well as buy the book via Amazon.in
Read in: 3-odd hours
Plot Summary: 'What I intend to say to you will come as a shock....'
Lady Athelinda Playford has planned a house party at her mansion in Clonakilty, County Cork, but it is no ordinary gathering. As guests arrive, Lady Playford summons her lawyer to make an urgent change to her will - one she intends to announce at dinner that night. She has decided to cut off her two children without a penny and leave her fortune to someone who has only weeks to live....
Among Lady Playford's guests are two men she has never met - the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard. Neither knows why he has been invited...until Poirot starts to wonder if Lady Playford expects a murderer to strike. But why does she seem so determined to provoke in the presence of a possible killer?
When the crime is committed in spite of Poirot's best efforts to stop it, and the victim is not who he expected it to be, will he be able to find the culprit and solve the mystery?
General Thoughts: I am a big Agatha Christie fan! Love her books, love the good common sense life lessons therein and whenever I am not sure what to read (aka big, fat reading slump!), I invariably pick up an Agatha Christie book. This is the second book that the Agatha Christie estate has commissioned Sophie Hannah to write. The first book- Monogram Murders- has been reviewed here.
Things I Liked:
1. The premise of the book was very interesting. There is a massively dysfunctional family, a matriarch who has semi-inappropriate feelings for a charming outsider, a sudden change in a will, which leaves people unhappy- basically, a perfect recipe for murder. What is not to like? *says with a non-creepy smile*
2. The family dynamics of the Playford clan is really, truly messed up and interesting. There is pretty much everyone at the mansion who has a motive to murder someone! So, that makes the mystery quite interesting.
3. The murder, the account of the eye-witness and how Poirot and Catchpool go about solving the case is also pretty interesting.
Things I Didn't Like:
1. There is a reveal about an event in that happened in the past, which makes it pretty clear who the real murderer is. It reveals a really strong motive for murder, but the book plods on for about a 100 more pages, which it didn't have to!
2. There were a bunch of unlikable characters in this book, which was the point of it, I guess but most of Agatha Christie's book had, at least, a few characters that were likable, so this book did stray from that formula, so to speak.
Rating: 3/5
This new series of Poirot books are quite decent, but not really the same as the original- obviously! Definitely worth a read, though.
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