This next one is by one of my favourite authors and if nothing else it serves to illustrate that fruit can get you killed! This may be true only in fiction but hey... why take any chances?!
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Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie
In this one Poirot and his little grey cells are called in to investigate a murder that happened at a Hallowe'en party. It is kind of a heinous little crime, especially as it concerns the killing of a young child... well actually two... Almost three. A friend of Poirot's asks for his help when a murder is committed in the village she lives in so our good friend potters down and gets to work. As usual he does not seem to be doing much of anything, certainly not much relating to the murder that happened and wastes his time talking to people about strange happenings of the past and other deaths and strange occurrences that happened years ago. Fortunately Hastings in not here to get all riled up about it and I could read about Poirot pottering about all day if I had to, so I was happy for the leisurely pace the story developed. The one thing that was a bit disturbing in this one was the fact that it involves children being killed. Innocent, all be it silly children being killed. Both pushed with their heads under water until they drowned. The fact that the killer has to strike twice is bad enough but for both to be children that only get killed because they want to feel important and clever is kind of sad.
But, back to our hero. Poirot, after some wandering about gets to the crux of it! He finds out that the girl at the party was killed for saying she saw a murder. Unfortunately for the killer this girl was not the one who really saw the murder all those years ago and the killer has to strike again to prevent being exposed, killing another child. After all this I kind of had a good idea of who the person was who had really seen the murder all those years ago but not yet what that murder then entailed. This takes some more magical deducting from the master behind the scenes, leaving us as the reader in the dark as usual. He pieces together the life story of two of the characters of the book and exposes them for what they are. Ruthless, criminally indulgent towards themselves and selfish to the max. In the end things get a little tense as Poirot has to resort to some hired hands to stop another murder from happening but we manage to get to the end without a third child dying which is a bonus any way you look at it.
For me in this one there were not so many red herrings brought up as the potential murderer. It seems that most of Poirot's, and our time is spent in getting to grips with the history of the people involved in the story and figuring out what is truth and what not. That is perhaps why the dash for the real murderer in the end is quite nice and comforting.
Title: Hallowe'en Party
Author: Agatha Christie
336 pages
Harper Collins
ISBN# 0-00-712068-0
Books to be read: 130
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