My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Clean
Who wouldn't be pleased
to attend a small dinner party being held by Sir Charles Cartwright,
once the leading star of the London stage? At his "Crow's Nest" home in
Loomouth, Cornwall.
Unfortunately, thirteen guests arrived at the
actor's house, most unlucky. One of them was a vicar. It was to be a
particularly unlucky evening for the mild-mannered Reverend Stephen
Babbington, who choked on his cocktail, went into convulsions and died.
But when his martini glass was sent for chemical analysis, there was no
trace of poison -- just as Hercule Poirot, also in attendance, had
predicted. Even more troubling for the great detective, there was
absolutely no motive!
Agatha Christie fooled me yet again! And this time around, I feel like she really shouldn't have. Yet again she made me really like the killer too. This book had a slow start for me. Poirot is rather scarce in the book as other people take up investigating for most of it, and he advises them. I kept wondering when he was going to be more prominently featured in the book, and it took a long time. For most of the book, I thought I would probably give this three stars, but then it got really interesting, and that ending surprised me. I know it shouldn't have—for more than one reason, that I won't mention here because it would spoil the book—but it did, and it made me enjoy the book so much more.
Part of me wants to say that this is very convoluted and extravagant, and it would have been much easier for the killer to have done something else, even if it would have been more obvious. But at the same time this ended up being so enjoyable, and I think the way it all happened said a lot about the killer's personality.
As for the TV adaptation, I thought the ITV episode was very well done. This wasn't one of my favorite books in the series, even though I liked it a lot, but this episode was definitely one of my favorite episodes. It was very faithful to the book, even if there were some smaller details that were changed, and the character of Satterthwaite was eliminated. I thought the changes were the right kind of changes for an adaptation. The tone was perfect, the acting was superb, the music that accompanied the episode was a good match, and Poirot was more present. It actually left me with a lot of feels by the end, that I didn't have after finishing the book. I actually enjoyed the TV episode more than the book this time. That's always a surprise!
There's another adaptation with Peter Ustanov and Tony Curtis that was made for TV. I planned to watch it, but after the perfection that was the ITV episode, I can't bring myself to do that right now. Maybe I will get to it later.
“In all the world there is nothing so curious and so interesting and so beautiful as truth.”
"There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered," said Poirot. "It might have been me."
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