The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

There are some minor spoilers ahead of this review.

This was my second Christie novel and I really liked it! It’s also my second Poirot novel too (I read and studied ‘Dead Man’s Folly’ during my undergrad, and it was what got me into mysteries in the first place!) and I enjoyed watching him figure out another case.

I’m not going to lie, though, it took me some time to get used to Christie’s writing and the genre of Murder Mystery again—I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary thrillers now to the point where I am subconsciously or indirectly expecting major plot twists and (often unrealistic) shocking actions done by the murderer towards the end. The ending of this was surprising, but since this is more of a mystery than a thriller, the revelation didn’t feel as intense for me. Christie also hid an important clue, which undermined my suspicion of a particular character and their motivation. It’s a clever and necessary hint, but one I felt was dropped too suddenly.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey I took with Poirot to solve this case. There were minor twists and turns at every corner and more frustrating dead ends compared to breakthroughs. At one point (and this is down to Christie’s incredible storytelling), I genuinely thought that we were the ones responsible for everything that was happening. We know and have more evidence about the case than Poirot does, yet we still don’t know the answers. Was it perhaps that we were in denial of the situation and reality? Spoiler alert, it’s not, and we weren’t responsible at all, but it was still a great opportunity for me to doubt us as readers and our unreliability.

I really loved the pacing in this and couldn’t put it down! It’s a shame I had life commitments as I was reading this one, otherwise I would’ve been able to curl up on the sofa and dedicate all of my time to it!

This was a solid 4.5-star read for me and I’m excited to read more Poirot books in the future!