• Author: Sophie Hannah
• Series: New Hercule Poirot Mysteries #3
• Genre: Historical Fiction/Murder Mystery
• No. of pages: 400
• Dates read: 03.05.2021 – 06.05.2021
• Star Rating: 3 stars
• Challenge: Sequels

Plot: Returning home after lunch one day, Hercule Poirot finds an angry woman waiting outside his front door. She demands to know why Poirot has sent her a letter accusing her of the murder of Barnabas Pandy, a man she has neither heard of nor ever met. Poirot has also never heard of a Barnabas Pandy, and has accused nobody of murder. Shaken, he goes inside, only to find that he has a visitor waiting for him — a man who also claims also to have received a letter from Poirot that morning, accusing him of the murder of Barnabas Pandy… Poirot wonders how many more letters of this sort have been sent in his name. Who sent them, and why? More importantly, who is Barnabas Pandy, is he dead, and, if so, was he murdered? And can Poirot find out the answers without putting more lives in danger? 

So, after loving the second book, Closed Casket, as much as I did! I was super excited to get back into this series. Now, while this book didn’t quite meet my expectations it wasn’t a bad book at all. It just didn’t read the mark like book 2 did. I still enjoyed my reading experience with this book.

My main thought is that the plot on paper is really good but the writing was missing something for me.

The writing was pleasant and enjoyable but it was just that pleasant. This time around the writing didn’t really grab me. As we were going from suspect to suspect and slowly uncovering the mystery, while I wanted to know what happened, I felt that writing itself wasn’t doing enough to entice me. I feel like if I had picked this book up first it might have deterred me a bit from reading the rest of the series but since I know that Hannah has such great plots I carried on and wasn’t disappointed by the ending.

The plot itself though was great. I did enjoy how it ended and why things occurred the way that it did and I did leave the book feeling satisfied by the story and how it came together by the final quarter. But like I said I felt the writing could have done a better job at reeling you in.

The characters were really interesting in this book. I think most of the side characters were a little bit flat and that Hannah didn’t put much effort into really expanding on them and I felt that the Rule side of the story was left unsolved resulting in disappointment as I felt that Hannah could have tied elements of that story together better. I think if you weren’t apart of the main family in this novel your character was not being developed too much.

That being said I really enjoyed the characters of the deceased’s family. They all varied and were different and you didn’t know who you could trust or what to expect which I enjoyed.

I think one of the main themes in this books is morals. What do you stand for, will you change your morals if something comes along to sway you? Will you stand steadfast by your convictions until your dying breath or will you seek or give out forgiveness. I did think this theme weaved itself very nicely throughout the main and side plots and I think this is one of Hannah’s strongest elements.

Overall, I didn’t love this as much as I loved her previous work, there were some bumps along the way with this book but it was still enjoyable and worth a read.