Genre: Mystery
Published: 1938
Personal rating: 4/5
Yearly count: 69
It is Christmas Eve. The Lee family reunion is shattered by a deafening crash of furniture, followed by a high-pitched wailing scream. Upstairs, the tyrannical Simeon Lee lies dead in a pool of blood, his throat slashed. But when Hercule Poirot, who is staying in the village with a friend for Christmas, offers to assist, he finds an atmosphere not of mourning but of mutual suspicion. It seems everyone had their own reason to hate the old man.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is an old-fashioned mystery, where all suspects are gathered in one manor house in the country and the murder victim is despised by all. The fact that it is Christmas makes the actions of Simeon Lee, the murder victim, all the more vicious, and without it being Christmas the murder would probably never have taken place, or at least there would have been fewer suspects with motive around. As always in Agatha Christie’s books there are plenty of secrets to go around and it falls to Hercule Poirot to find those details that actually matter in this murder case. I don’t always like Hercule Poirot as a character, but he was more tolerable in this book than normal. And the twist at the end was brilliant.
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