HarperCollins Five Little Pigs, Crime & Thriller, Paperback, Agatha Christie
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Price: £9.99
Brand: HarperCollins
Description: Agatha Christie's ingenious murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. HarperCollins Five Little Pigs, Crime & Thriller, Paperback, Agatha Christie - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Harper Collins
Product ID: 9780007527519
Delivery cost: Spend £20 and get free shipping
Dimensions: 129x198mm
Keywords: Poirot,Crime,Mystery,Detective
ISBN: 9780007527519
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Author: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5
Review: Watching it on TV was one thing but reading the book is simply better. The way it is structured and so easy to follow and yet I was still surprised at the ending. I completely forgot how it ended and I was so surprised. I loved reading this and it is definitely my favourite of her stories
Author: Kindle Customer
Rating: 3
Review: The book centres around the famous womanising painter Amyas Crale; his long suffering wife Caroline Crale; their friends the Blake brothers; Caroline's half sister Angela; her governess, Miss Williams; and Elsa, the young woman Amyas was having an affair with. Amyas Crale is poisoned. Caroline is suspected of it and eventually imprisoned, seemingly without any doubt as to her guilt. But years after her death in prison, when her daughter comes of age and inherits her parents fortune, she comes into the possession of a letter written by Caroline that says she was innocent. The story follows Poirot's investigation into the matter. This novel is first and foremost a character study. Like most of Agatha Christie's books, there IS a well crafted mystery, with lots of surreptitiously placed clues and twists and turns. Everyone is suspected at one point or other. Everyone could conceivably have commited the crime. There is always the lingering question of whether Caroline really did just do it. But because the crime happened in the past, the actual details of it remain set in stone and relatively simple. The subject of the book then becomes the psychology of the characters. At the centre of it is a tempestuous marriage, the people within it, and the ripple effects on those around them. It explores the wildly varied ways a single person or event can be viewed by different people, and the complex biases behind those views. It is primarily about people before it is about the intricacies of a mystery. Depending on what you come to Agatha Christie novels for, you may or may not like that. If you come first and foremost for the whoddunit - the HOW of a crime as well as the who; the staunch evidence clicking neatly into place; the action and urgency of the present, of needing to catch the killer and bring them to justice - then you might not like this book. Most of it focuses on the characters' views of Caroline, and whether or not she could have or did kill Amyas.The same events are repeated often, as the important point is how they are regarded differently by different people, and why. At times I found this tedious. This is entirely a book of conversations and retrospection; there's no action or urgency, so it entirely rests on its characters and how interested we are in them. As a result, my interest sometimes wavered. The characters themselves could be exhausting - it's a book of mostly unlikeable people doing mostly unlikeable things - so when they aren't interesting, there isn't much to keep you engaged because most of them are fairly unsympathetic. Poirot himself rarely interjects, other than to ask incisive questions, and sometimes not for chapters at a time. He comes in at the end to bring everything together, but other than that, his appearances and influence are fairly scant, as all he is there to do is is coax information out of the relevant people and make sense of it. If you need Poirot to play a large and active role in a mystery, this isn't the book for you. All this aside, I finished this book fairly quickly and I can't say I wasn't engaged most of the time. As tiring and unlikeable as the characters sometimes were, Christie's potrait of them and their actions and reactions felt three dimensional and intriguing. She's often praised for her astute observations on human nature, and while I have found that wanting in a lot of her other work, I did not find that wanting here. It's an excellent character study - she developed and portrayed her characters well. They were complex and real. Messy. At times it felt like she was indulgent towards certain characters, and made excuses for them, while being harsh towards the same behaviours in other people. And unsurprisingly, some of her observations were dated and did not age well. Nevertheless, her character's actions were consistent with who she presented them to be, and you got the sense that you were unspooling a thread, getting closer and closer to the other end where the truth lay. And there, you didn't just find the who and how of the crime - you found the true nature of these people that you've spent an entire book with. The things they told you, and the things you read between the lines. Their subjective appraisal of themselves and others and the truth. In that sense, I felt rewarded for sticking with them. It was a thorough and complete character portrait with a logical end. Ultimately, I think a lot of whether or not you'll like this book rests more on your feelings about how Christie presents the people in it, than it does on a brilliantly conceived mystery plot.
