Unapologetic Reviews

The Sittaford Mystery ( 1931 ) was my final December pick for the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge . This one was chosen by vote, and I did vote for it, even though at the time I had slightly the wrong idea about what kind of book it was. For some reason, I was convinced it was a Poirot mystery . When I realised it wasn’t, I briefly wondered whether it had at least been adapted as a Poirot story, but as far as I can tell, it has been adapted as a Miss Marple episode instead. Or perhaps I was mixing it up with something else entirely. Either way, it wasn’t what I expected, but that didn’t end up being the main issue. What makes this novel stand out in Christie’s body of work is its protagonist. The character we mainly follow is Emily Trefusis , a woman determined to prove the innocence of her fiancé, who has been arrested for murder. Rather than waiting passively for events to unfold, Emily actively investigates, travelling, questioning people, and pushing the case forward. I a...

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...

I read Towards Zero (1944) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser. Going in, I remembered this story as a Miss Marple mystery, which turned out to be misleading. That version comes from the television adaptation. In its original form, Towards Zero does not feature Miss Marple at all. Instead, this is a Superintendent Battle novel, one of Christie’s lesser-known recurring detectives. Knowing that helped recalibrate my expectations, but it also highlighted how much my memory of the story was shaped by the adaptation. Certain beats were familiar, others felt different, and at times I wasn’t sure whether I was remembering the book or the television version. The setup itself is solid. A group of people gathers in a coastal setting, old relationships resurface, tensions simmer, and everything builds towards an inevitable act of violence. Christie’s idea here is that murder does not begin at the moment of the cri...

At Bertram’s Hotel ( 1965 ) is a Miss Marple novel that I read as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and in several ways it felt quite unique compared to the other books I read this year. This is very firmly a Miss Marple story. She is present from the beginning to the end, and that alone made it feel refreshing after so many novels where the detective appears late or feels almost incidental. This is also one of Christie’s later novels, and you can feel that immediately. The book is steeped in a quiet sense of unease about modernity. It looks back at an older London , an older way of life, and contrasts it with a world that is changing fast and not always for the better. That sense of nostalgia, mixed with suspicion, runs through the entire story and gives it a very distinct atmosphere. I knew this story quite well going in, because it is one of my favourite episodes from the Miss Marple television series . That actually helped, because the novel itself is very diff...

I read One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and this time it really was a Poirot novel in the fullest sense. Poirot is present for most of the story, which genuinely surprised me. After reading so many books where he appears only at the very end, it was refreshing to have him involved from early on. This is also one of the novels that features Inspector Japp as a proper character. In the television series, Japp replaces a rotating cast of inspectors from the books. Here, though, he is exactly where he belongs, working alongside Poirot in a way that feels natural and familiar. This is the story I always think of as “the dentist one”. The murder of a dentist is the central event, and interestingly, the Hungarian title reflects that directly. The English nursery rhyme does not translate well, so the Hungarian edition went with The Dentist’s Chair , which honestly makes a lot of sense. I realised while reading that I had encountered this...

I read Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, and it came as a genuine surprise. This is not a novel, but a memoir . In it, Agatha Christie writes about her life in the Middle East with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan , during the 1930s. You might expect a book focused on archaeology, but that is not really what this is. While archaeological work forms part of the background, the book feels more like a snapshot of a region and a time that no longer exists. Much of it takes place in Syria and surrounding areas between the two world wars. Christie does not analyse cultures in depth. Instead, she records moments, people, and stories, and in doing so captures a world that feels astonishingly distant now. What struck me most was her attitude. This is a woman born in the nineteenth century, raised in England, suddenly dealing with dust, heat, illness, and a near-total lack of comfort. And yet she adapts far better than...

I read Crooked House (1949) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser . That, oddly enough, turned out to be part of the problem for me. Fraser usually narrates Poirot novels, and since this is not a Poirot book, I kept mentally casting the narrator as Hastings . The story is told in the first person by Charles Hayward , and even knowing his name, the narration still felt oddly anonymous at times. Because Fraser’s voice is so closely tied to the Poirot series in my mind, it created a strange overlap that affected how I experienced the book. What surprised me was how familiar the story felt. I was convinced I remembered it as a Poirot case, even though it isn’t one. I’ve never seen the Crooked House film adaptation, so I’m still not entirely sure why certain scenes felt so vivid to me. It may be because the structure of the story would easily allow Poirot to be inserted into it, and perhaps that’s how my memory...

I read Cards on the Table (1936) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. The premise is wonderfully bold. Four detectives and four suspected murderers are invited to a dinner party by the eccentric Mr Shaitana . By the end of the night, the host is dead, and the real game begins. Christie herself once said this was one of her favourites, and it is easy to see why. The setup is unusual, even daring, because the mystery relies far less on physical clues and far more on psychology. Poirot is here, but he is not working alone. He is joined by Superintendent Battle , Colonel Race , and the sharp-witted Ariadne Oliver . Each approaches the suspects differently, and Christie uses those differences to explore four distinct ways of thinking about guilt. The suspects themselves are a study in possibility. Each has a dark shadow in their past, and each is capable of murder. At times, it truly feels as though it could have been anyone. That may be why I never remember the solution....

I read The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) for my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge . At first, I confused it with The Clocks . Both involve clocks and a murder, but The Clocks is a Poirot story and this one isn’t. That initial confusion set the tone for me, as I went in expecting one thing and found myself in quite another. This is Christie in her thriller phase . In the late 1920s, she liked to play with secret societies, masked meetings, and the idea that danger lurks just beyond the country-house gates. The novel also reuses the setting from The Secret of Chimneys and brings back a few characters, though I wasn’t familiar with them before. It gave me the feeling of being introduced to a group of old friends everyone else already knows. The heroine here is “Bundle” Brent, young, sharp, and impulsive. When one of her friends turns up dead, she charges headlong into the mystery. What begins as the familiar comfort of a body in a grand house shifts into something stranger. There ar...

The Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie is a Poirot novel that was first published in 1934. Christie plays with a theatrical structure in Three Act Tragedy, dividing the mystery like a stage play.  The story begins with a party at Sir Charles Cartwright ’s house. We are introduced to the cast of characters and you immediately start to wonder who is going to die. It’s really best to go into the rest of the story blind, as it has surprising twists and turns from the beginning. The story itself is rather slow-paced and feels meandering at some points, more focused on the characters than the mystery, but in the end it all comes together. Although this is a Poirot story, he appears very little in it. He’s there when the first murder takes place, briefly mentioned in the second act, but only returns for the third act to solve the mystery and dazzle everyone with his little gray cells . The majority of the sleuthing is done by Mr Satterthwaite and Hermione “Egg” Lytton Gore . Mr Satt...

Agatha Christie ’s The Thirteen Problems is a compilation of thirteen short stories. This is the first time she introduces her beloved character, Miss Marple . The stories themselves weren’t made into movies, but elements from them were used. I listened to it as an audiobook. It’s very hard to talk about this book. The main plot device is that a group of people from many walks of life get together and tell each other mystery stories that actually happened. The narrator knows what the solution was, and the others try to guess. Predictably, Miss Marple gets it every time. However, this is only predictable for a modern audience — we know Miss Marple well by now. For the original readers, this came as a surprise. Although The Thirteen Problems was published as a collection in 1932, the short stories it contains were actually written and released earlier, starting in 1927. Christie later expanded Miss Marple into a full-length novel with The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. The book version...