Unapologetic Reviews

I read Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan because I was in the mood for something seasonal but not romantic. A Christmas murder mystery felt like a safe bet, and this one delivers exactly that: snow , isolation, wealth, discomfort, and a body in the hot tub before the mulled wine has time to cool. The story follows Emma, a barrister from a working class background, who joins her boyfriend Michael and his circle of extremely wealthy friends for Christmas in an Alpine chalet . They have been dating for six months, which matters more than it first appears. Emma expected a quiet holiday for two; instead, she finds herself stranded on a mountain with people who have known each other forever, who ski effortlessly, who move through luxury as if it were air. She cannot ski. She does not belong. She knows it, and they know it too. When one of the group is murdered, suspicion falls neatly and conveniently on the outsider. The plot unfolds through a compact series of twists, none of them wi...

Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) is officially a Poirot novel, but only just. This is one of those books where Poirot exists more in name than in presence. For most of the story, he is completely absent, and when he finally appears, it feels as if he has simply dropped in to tidy everything up. I’ve heard people say that quite a few Poirot novels work like this, and this one is a perfect example. The opening of the book doesn’t even feel like a murder mystery. It starts with international politics, revolution, and stolen jewels, edging into spy novel territory. That part dragged for me, partly because it felt disconnected from what the book eventually becomes. Only later does the story settle into its main setting, a girls’ boarding school , which is where most of the novel actually takes place. Once we arrive at the school, the cast expands rapidly. There are teachers, students, staff, and police officers, and I struggled to identify clear main characters. Two schoolgirls stand out mor...

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino is my fourth encounter with this author, and once again, it confirms why his books linger long after the final chapter. I came to this one in a slightly roundabout way. I listened to it as an audiobook, largely because it is one of the few Higashino novels translated into Hungarian. Unfortunately, it is now out of print, which makes it impossible to gift or easily recommend locally. That is a shame, because this is one of his most distinctive and unsettling novels. The story centres on Ishigami , a quiet, deeply introverted mathematics professor, and his neighbour Yasuko , a single mother living a restrained, anxious life with her daughter. When a murder occurs early on, the book does something unexpected: it shows you far more than a traditional mystery would. This is not a question of who did it, at least not in the usual sense. Instead, the tension comes from how and why, and whether intelligence, devotion, and guilt can ever truly outm...