Thursday, October 9, 2008

Hercule Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express

Year: 1934
Location: On a train

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of year. But by the morning there is one less passenger. An American lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside…Red herrings galore are put in the path of Hercule Poirot to try and keep him off the scent but in a dramatic dénouement he succeeds in coming up with not one, but two solutions to the crime.

Murder on the Orient Express was the first Agatha Christie book recommended to me, I was thirteen-years-old and never got around to reading it. Now that I've finally read it eight years later I regret not doing so when it was first recommended to me. I've recently started reading Hercule Poirot books: Black Coffee, The ABC Murders, Hickory Dickory Dock, and Death in the Clouds, are the only four Hercule Poirot (pronounced: ER-CUE-L PWAH-ROW) books I've read so far; and to me the Hercule Poirot series had a very black and white view of crime. But in this story it is the total opposite. There is a huge gray area that couldn't be overlooked. I now realize why many people love this book and why there are so many *pop culture* references to it. I really enjoyed this story and I'm really happy I decided to read it after all this time.

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