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Agatha Christie – The Seven Dials Mystery | Review

Title: The Seven Dials Mystery

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 192

Rating: 4/5

I was taken by surprise with this one, and that’s a good thing. I’ve been getting through the last few unread Agatha Christie books on my pile and so I have a sort of automatic tendency to assume that I’ve left the worst ones until last. That was definitely not true in this case.

Weirdly, for the first time in my life, I found myself relating to the murder victim in Agatha Christie book, mainly because he was something of a spoiled young man who had a habit of sleeping in late. The core plot basically revolves around a plot that some of his friends hatch to plant a bunch of “alarum” clocks beneath his bed to wake him up nice and early.

For me, this is in the top 20% Christie books, and that’s saying something. There’s a lot of good characterisation here, a fun little mystery for you to enjoy and just overall a lot of that classic Christie goodness. You can tell she was in her prime.

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Agatha Christie – Third Girl | Review

Title: Third Girl

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.75/5

This book was fun, the first Christie novel that I’ve picked up for a little while now and really just the ticket considering Ariadne Oliver is one of my favourite of Christie’s characters. It also has the kind of setup that I like, where the main witness to the crime doesn’t really know what it was that she saw.

The only thing that I would say is that this one is just pretty competent. There’s a reason why I’ve never really seen anyone talk about it, why I hadn’t come across it in a charity shop and why it took me so long to finally end up with a copy.

So would I recommend it? Yeah, probably. It’s a good little addition to the Poirot series and features the old detective as an older man, to the point at which the story almost doesn’t happen because someone thinks he’s too old to be able to help them out.

The only real problem is that it doesn’t excel in any way. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that Ariadne Oliver is in it, it would mostly be forgettable, but Mrs Oliver is so cool that I’m always happy whenever she shows up in a story.

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