11 books in and i can see a lot of similarities in the many books that came prior to this , but along with that I can also witness the attraction of Christie’s writing and especially the Poirot series
What I liked :
One of the turn off about the whole Poirot series is the way Poirot is represented , most times he comes off as an arrogant , pompous , narcissist and especially a know-it-all, so for me the biggest positive to take from this book in particular in the series is how he is made humane and his negative attitude , in particular his egoism , explained and made a topic of pity from the reader in this book .
Meanwhile Christie once again delivers on a crisp head-scratcher of a mystery with a very clever use of a toxin that not many , even today , think of when it comes to poisons . Of course the author’s experience with toxicology helps her in the course of the book to create avenue few authors could , but dare I say , not even the best toxicologist in the world could come up with such an engrossing murder mystery the way she did .
There were a lot of detective book stereotypes that Christie managed to break successfully , while many detective books take a particular course of action , this book had Christie change such action and take an altogether route and work it well.
There is also a lot of focus put on the police procedural side of the things ,mainly upon how difficult it is to obtain evidence for cops in this world. This was also a nice little addition in the book , since mostly Poirot laughs on the cops and their ways , but for the first time we find their side of the tale
What I didn’t like :
Now here’s the thing I mentioned previously about the similarities in the book series that has become tiring to see , the whole charm of the mystery book genre resides in the whodunnit , but because of how similar some of the books in the series have been the “who” in the whodunnit is easy to figure out .
One of my biggest gripe about the book is that much of the book felt unnecessary the story focussed so much on other characters and their workings that we spent a lot lesser time with Poirot and to top it off , a lot of the book had Hastings and Oh how much I hate that character . What this achieved was that the story took too long to get going and once it did , the evidences were handed to our protagonists and they never worked for it and when they did work for it , we were narrated about how they obtained said clues instead of actually reading how they obtained them.
Conclusion:
In the end , it all came across as a mediocre but typical Poirot book , considering it followed Murder on the Orient Express , this was a massive let down , but as a stand alone it was a big meh , with some ingenius and innovative addition and some bored repetition .
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