Hercule Poirot – DaneCobain.com

Title: The Big Four

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 160

Rating: 4/5

This is a Hercule Poirot book in which the great detective comes up against a criminal network called The Big Four, which is hell-bent on world domination. It’s arguably one of the books in which the stakes are the highest, and I think that in itself makes it interesting.

But I also thought that the story line was pretty good, and I think that it would even be a decent one to go to if you’re relatively new to Poirot. It would make a good movie too, especially if you could get an ensemble cast, and so I’m kind of surprised that it’s not more popular than it is.

Still, there was at least something about it that stopped it from making its way into my top tier of Agatha Christie books. It was good but not great, I guess.

Learn more about The Big Four.

Agatha Christie – Surprise! Surprise! | Review

Title: Surprise! Surprise!

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.5/5

This book is something of an oddity, and in fact I hadn’t even heard of it until I spotted it going as part of an Agatha Christie job lot on eBay. Essentially, because different publishers released different books in different regions, there are some unique USA titles that never came out in the UK, and vice versa.

That mostly applies to short story collections, of which this is the perfect example. In fact, to say that I read this is almost cheating because I only bothered to read the stories that I hadn’t read before, and so there were only four of the twelve or thirteen in here that I actually read. I remember the ones that I skipped, though.

In fact, this is actually a pretty decent little read, if only because it features a bunch of Christie’s most well-known characters, from Parker Pyne to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. It also includes the title story of The Witness for the Prosecution, which I’ve seen performed as a play before. I think the play was a little better than the short story, but both of them are very much worth consuming. All in all then, I’d have to say that this one is worth reading.