A Murder Is Announced

I\’m going to try to give a take here from the point of view of a person that has read and watched many murder mysteries but just started reading Agatha Christie. The biggest takeaway I can give is that her twists are extremely cliche\’, BUT they are cliche\’ because she is the person that created many of the twists originally, and they have been rehashed so many times over the years. I figured out Murder on the Orient Express about halfway through for that reason. I figured out Crooked House about two-thirds of the way through for this reason. Same thing with this book. The twists are easy to spot because we have been inundated with them so many times throughout our culture, but I can respect Agatha Christie for creating them in the first place! As for this book, it is solid and well-written. The characters are exceptionally fleshed out. I\’m sure that when it was first published, it was mind-blowing! Today, it\’s very cliche\’.

I didn\’t bother looking inside the Kindle version because I knew it was Agatha Christie. I wish I had because once I opened the book on my Kindle, I saw that this Kindle version is full of bad formatting. EVERY apostrophe and quotation mark appears as a string of gibberish! Too distracting to be able to read it. How incredibly careless of whoever put this together for publication on the Kindle!

My mother used to take a break every afternoon to read one chapter of an Agatha Christie novel while the smaller children were napping and before the others came home from school. 60 years later I decided to find out what hooked her. The writing is economic. The plotting is brilliant, and it is clear why this is a classic whodunnit. The violence, by the way, is discreetly \”off camera,\” so to speak.

Only Agatha Christie can make every single person in her books interesting. One just wants to know more about all of them, their secrets and their crimes. This book features my favored character, Miss Marple, and even though Miss Marple is not playing the dominant role here, in my opinion, this is one of the best mysteries by Christie. After reading recently several intense contemporary thrillers, reading classic Christie again was like catching a fresh breath of clean air and a very soothing experience. The plot is great, the deaths were not described in gory details, the twists keep coming constantly and nobody is what he/she seems to be. There is some predictability to “whodunit” since author gives reader fair hints but there are still many surprises about “who is who”. In short: pure reading pleasure. It is really amazing that after 70 years since it was written this book by Christie-mother of all mysteries- still passes the test of time in flying colors. (And it is currently on sale, just $1.99)

I purchased this book and immediately discovered that many punctuation marks were replace by an a with a caret on top combined with a Euro symbol, a capital C and other graphic symbols. I did attempt to read it, but could not continue because of the continual presence of the substituted characters. I returned it immediately and looked for another version, but every version that allowed a look inside had the same issue.

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