My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Clean
From seat No. 9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers on the short flight from Paris to London. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No. 13, sat a countess with a poorly concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No. 8, a writer of detective fiction was being troubled by an aggressive wasp.
Yes, Poirot is almost ideally placed to take it all in, except what he did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No. 2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman. Murdered, and likely by someone in Poirot’s immediate proximity.
An enjoyable mystery, although not one of my favorites. I did figure out who the murderer was pretty early on, although I did second guess myself a few times. There are a ton of red herrings in this book, so that made it hard to know for sure if I was right. I was also sure I knew how the murder was done the whole time, only to find out I was wrong about that part. I didn't find any of the passengers on the plane to be likable as they all had some serious flaws, even the one person I'm pretty sure I was supposed to like. I think that made me not like the book quite as much as I could have. Mostly, I found this to be interesting, but with some dull spots that caused me to get bored with the story. Still, it was a solid mystery.
The TV episode of Poirot was pretty good, and stayed pretty faithful to the book, but there were some changes. A few of the characters were cut out. Inspector Japp is given a larger role than in the book. Jane Grey is an air stewardess on the plane. And the whole bit about Jean Dupont falling in love with Jane is left out.
“Close your eyes, my friend instead of opening them wide. Use the eyes of the brain, not of the body. Let the little grey cells of the mind function … Let it be their task to show you what actually happened.
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