Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Genre: mystery
Published: 1934
Pages: 322

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of the year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. A passenger lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside...

This is only the second Agatha Christie I've had the pleasure of reading--the first was And Then There Were None a few weeks ago--and I think I am already becoming hooked on her books.  Her style of writing is bare bones, she does not dwell on long descriptions of setting or characterization apart from what is necessary to tell an excellent, plot-driven mystery story.  Nevertheless, I found myself staring at the book's open pages for far longer than it should take me to read the text as I mentally ran through possible clues and racked my brain as to the identity of the murderer.  Well, Christie fooled me, so all my deliberation and reflection turned out to be for naught!

 Murder on the Orient Express stars one of Christie's two famous detectives, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.  Poirot is rather like Sherlock Holmes in that he is a well-respected detective known for cracking the cases which elude others and the police.  While he is also a bit arrogant--er, very sure of his powers of deduction--, Poirot differs from Holmes in his methods.  If Sherlock Holmes had been asked to solve a murder which occurred in one carriage on a snowbound train, he would likely pace up and down the corridor examining the crime scene, the floor, and the sleeves of all the passengers for suspicious substances which would in some complicated way allow him to deduce the identity of the killer.

Poirot, on the other hand, plants himself in a room and has each of the passengers (the only possible suspects, as the train is snowbound) come in for an interview.  He uses psychology to determine their guilt or lack thereof and, surprisingly, a bit of guesswork.  For example, Poirot asks some of the passengers questions which are intended to startle them into revealing something they may be trying to conceal.  He also analyzes phrasing and word choice... when he asks a woman if she owns a scarlet kimono (because the murderer may have been seen wearing one), she replies, "No, that is not mine," suggesting she may know whose it is, though she insists otherwise.  Poirot also rapidly alters his persona and method of questioning so as to best provoke answers or cooperation from the suspects according to their personalities.

The murder occurs fairly early on, as an unlikable American gentleman is murdered in his room at night.  Poirot begins his investigation the morning after the murder and interviews each of the passengers to obtain their alibis and any information they might have in the way I described above.  Among the suspects are a countess, the dead man's secretary, a conductor, a noisy American matron, and an English governess.  After interviewing each of these people and examining the clues (a handkerchief is found in the victim's room and a woman in a scarlet kimono was sighted in the corridor), Poirot finally lays out the solution to the friend who is helping him with the investigation.  I could be wrong, but I don't think the identity of the murderer is one that many people would be able to guess.  I changed my mind about who I thought the killer was at least four times, and by the end I did not have a clue!  I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  The next Agatha Christie that I read will be The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

This book is

brilliant                      diverting                 surprising

This review was one for my Classics Club list! 

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Genre: mystery/thriller
Pages: 350
Published: 2009

Synopsis:

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice" of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.


All of the characters in Dark Places (including the narrator) are entirely unlikable and the subject matter is dark to say the least.  However, I found the book to be utterly intriguing and surprisingly excellent!

I devoured this one, my first Gillian Flynn, in a space of a few hours while sitting on the deck of a cruise ship this past week.  Whilst frighteningly pale people lounged around drinking martinis and frighteningly red people attempted to ease themselves into a hot tub without visibly cringing, I sat in the shade and indulged in this wild, expertly-crafted tale of murder, devil worship, and family skeletons.

From the moment I "met" the narrator Libby Day, I wanted to know more about her bleak life and her bleaker past, why she calls herself an "unlovable adult" and why in the world her brother Ben, now in prison, murdered the rest of her family when Libby was seven.  Libby is a very interesting character.  On the surface, she is a thirty-four year old woman who has never had a job or any dreams or real achievements, unless you count trying to pay the bills by writing a memoir about her murdered family.  She mentally beats herself up for relying on her gruesome celebrity status as the only survivor of the massacre to skate by without actually doing anything, yet it is impossible not to pity her for the horrors she has suffered.  In addition, Libby is pretty funny at times.  Her biting observations about certain characters and self-deprecating humor do a lot to lighten the mood of the book.

Libby describes her soul.

Libby's voice has the power to completely suck the reader into her little world, to let you see the things she saw and the emptiness she feels vividly.  However, the novel is not entirely in first person, because the chapters alternate between Libby's first-person POV in the present and flashbacks from the POVs of her mother, Patty, and her brother Ben.  So, the story unfolds rather like a film.  The author gives us little bits and pieces of what happened "that night" when Libby's family were killed, meanwhile Libby is trying to piece together everything in the present, sometimes working a bit more slowly than the reader thanks to our privileged insights from Patty and Ben's chapters, and sometimes having startling epiphanies.

I loved the way the characters kept me guessing, though I didn't really like any of the characters themselves.  However, my one complaint about Dark Places concerns its conclusion.  I felt that the big reveal of what happened to Libby's family that horrible night was a little, well, not deus ex machina, but rather diabolus ex machina, a devil from the machine, a cop-out on the author's part.  Those who have read it (more than 300,000 people on Goodreads alone!) will know what I mean by that.  To avoid spoiling anything, though, it suffices to say that I was not quite satisfied with the way the mystery turned out, although I loved every moment of Libby's investigation and the way it all unraveled.

I did feel a bit cheated, but on the other hand I put this rather disturbing tale aside without suffering from any lingering feeling of melancholy or despair at the way people sometimes treat each other in this world--a symptom I commonly have after finishing contemporary crime novels or watching thriller movies like Taken, etc.  Dark Places does indeed alight upon the dark corners of people's psyches, but ultimately the story is more hopeful than I had anticipated based on its beginnings.  Of course, it didn't hurt that there are few dark places or melancholy thoughts to be found on a cruise ship sailing leisurely through the Caribbean!

This book is

mesmerizing                               gloomy                        immersive

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Genre: suspense, mystery
Pages: 264 (paperback)
Published: 1939

Synopsis: 
First, there were ten - a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal - and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion.

Review:

It's strange to think that I had never read a single Agatha Christie novel before deciding, on a whim yesterday, to pick up And Then There Were None.

I generally will read every genre with the notable and pretty strict exceptions of romance and mystery.  In the case of mystery, I have to admit that part of my prejudice stems from my utter lack of skill in predicting "whodunit" or what will happen next.  I so do not find it elementary, Watson, and frankly, this is partially a result of the way I operate as a reader.  I'm not a speed reader of the kind that you can find on Youtube, apparently absorbing whole books at the rate of five seconds a page.  However, I do read quite quickly and I read for information, purposefully picking out the most necessary bits on every page and somewhat skimming over the little details.  But in mystery novels it is these little details that matter the most, and this is definitely the case with And Then There Were None.  Tiny details of setting and dialogue that Christie briefly alights on turn out to be key to the twists and turns of the plot.  Even as a reader generally uninterested in the genre, I found myself captivated by the book and appreciative of her mad skills--truly, Christie was the "Queen of Mystery."

I also appreciated that this is not at all a detective story in the usual sense.  There is no central detective figure trying to wrap up the mystery of a previously-committed murder, but rather the murders are happening in the present.  Readers who share my aversion to mystery and detective stories but embrace horror will enjoy the sense of suspenseful inevitability of the murders on Indian Island, a sense created not only by the title And Then There Were None (note: the novel was originally published as Ten Little N******; click the link to read an article about the racist title's evolution through the years) but by the device of the morbid nursery rhyme which each of the characters find posted in their rooms upon arriving at the empty house on Indian Island.  The murders of the guests adhere strictly to this rhyme about "ten little Indians," so that we have a rough idea of how the next victim will die, but now when or who the victim will be.  For example, the rhyme declares, "Six little Indians playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five."  Just as in a number of good horror films, apparently childish things or nonsensical rhymes turn on to have a eerie power of life and death over the characters.

As far as the characters, one among the ten people on Indian Island is presumed to be the murderer, causing all these gruesome deaths that accord with the creepy nursery rhyme.  The rest of the guests  are essentially accused of murder by a mysterious disembodied Voice who terrifies them by announcing their respective crimes during their first evening in the island house's sitting room.  Taken together, these two facts kind of discourage the reader from getting too attached to any of them, and the novel is plot-driven to say the least even though knowing the characters is central to figuring out what is going on.  Christie does a good job characterizing the island guests considering that her writing is pretty sparse, and so is the dialogue.  We quickly see that Philip Lombard is cold-blooded like a character out of Heart of Darkness, Vera Claythorne is smart and intuitive, and Emily Brent is one of those well-meaning but frustrating ladies who thinks of herself as a living saint.  As always, I was completely stumped by the question of who the murderer might be!  All of my speculations turned out to be wrong, and the revelation at the end relies on a wild and ingenious twist which I don't think even many readers better-versed in the mystery genre would guess if they weren't already familiar with the story.      

The novel is absorbing and fast-paced, the sort of book that appeals to a huge variety of readers.  One can see why it has been adapted into so many films and series and plays over the years.  As usual, though, nothing can be better than reading the original novel and spending a few hours of a rainy day appreciating Christie's craft and the diabolical eeriness of it all, watching the twisted nursery rhyme play out.

I wholeheartedly recommend this classic suspense story and intend to pick up another Christie book soon, although I don't know which one.  She wrote so many!  I must be in the mood to scare myself to death by reading about old, haunted, secluded houses and the ghosts and murderers and madpeople in the attic who inhabit them, because I've also just started reading Stephen King's Bag of Bones and have contemplated yet another reading of Jane Eyre.

Rating:

The Liar Society by Laura & Lisa Roecker

Genre: YA contemp/ mystery
Pages: 361 (hardcover)
Published: Marcy 2011 by Sourcebooks
Recommended for: fans of YA mystery and Pretty Little Liars

Synopsis:
Kate Lowry didn't think dead best friends could send e-mails. But when she gets an e-mail from Grace, she’s not so sure. 

To: KateLowry@pemberlybrown.edu
Sent: Sun 9/14 11:59 PM
From: GraceLee@pemberlybrown.edu
Subject: (no subject)

Kate,
I'm here…
sort of.
Find Cameron.
He knows.
I shouldn't be writing.
Don't tell.
They'll hurt you.

Now Kate has no choice but to prove once and for all that Grace’s death was more than just a tragic accident. But secrets haunt the halls of her elite private school. Secrets people will do anything to protect. Even if it means getting rid of the girl trying to solve a murder...

My Take: 


Here's a fair warning: I really don't like mysteries.  I just don't, so this review is bound to be a little biased.  I'm the sort of person who can't stand surprises or clandestine whispers, and so it's hardly surprising that I find little enjoyment in books where our protagonist must slowly work her way to the truth of who-dunnit and then confront the murderer-perpetrator, typically spewing such exclamations as 'It was you!  You were the one who...'  Now, I know mysteries are actually a very popular genre and beloved by many.  Therefore I think The Liar Society would appeal much more to other readers.  But for me, personally, here's why this book and I didn't click:


The whole plot of this book felt vaguely familiar, like a clique that isn't quite over-used enough to be a clique, per say... it's just all eerily similar to an episode of Ghost Whisper you saw last week.  The premise-- a girl dies in a terrible tragedy and her friend later receives mysterious emails from her disused account telling her to seek out the truth-- is a 'hook' if I've ever heard one, and this was absolutely a difficult book to put down once you got started.  Yet I figured out the mystery of who killed Grace and why and who was involved long before our MC Kate did, which ruined the intended suspense even in the long-awaited climax and confrontation with the baddies.  I also was never quite clear on whether or not Grace-- who appears to Kate several times, often only as a glimpse of a black-haired girl who turns out to be somebody else entirely-- was in fact a ghost, or if Kate was simply spurred on by the memory of her best friend and somehow projecting her ghost.  None of the characters except for Kate and Grace were very memorable-- even Liam, the bad boy-type Kate begins to reluctantly date on-and-off and who the authors try to frame as the prime suspect, didn't make much of an impression.   I was annoyed by the pink-haired girl on the cover, too, if only because I did not read of one pink-haired girl in the book. (UPDATE: Turns out the ARC copy I won is drastically different from the finished book.  In the early ARCs, Kate is a plain brunette and never dyed her hair after Grace's death.)


Now, as to what I did like: I liked the feel of the exclusive private school, Pemberly Brown, which the girls attended.  The details of the stacks in the library's basement, the old chapel, and Grace's memorial bench made it an interesting story world to visit.  The warring secret societies and age-old traditions of the school proved cool as well, especially a candle-lit ritual among sophomore girls in a tower on school grounds.  The story alternates between the present, with Kate trying to piece together the mystery of Grace's tragic death, and the past, when Kate, Grace, and their friend Maddie received mysterious invitations to one of the school's most clandestine ritual celebrations... and Grace failed to come out of the chapel where it was to be held alive.  Overall, I certainly didn't love this one, but I think a lot of readers would.  It's 4+ stars rating on Goodreads proves that.

Cover: 3/5

Premise: 4/5

Characters: 3/5

Plot: 3/5

Overall Rating: 3/5

Review: Virals by Kathy Reichs

Genre: YA science fiction
Page Count: 464 (hardcover)
Released: November 2010
Recommended for: fans of Bones, fans of the Maximum Ride series

(from Goodreads): Tory Brennan, niece of acclaimed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (of the Bones novels and hit TV show), is the leader of a ragtag band of teenage "sci-philes" who live on a secluded island off the coast of South Carolina. When the group rescues a dog caged for medical testing on a nearby island, they are exposed to an experimental strain of canine parvovirus that changes their lives forever.

As the friends discover their heightened senses and animal-quick reflexes, they must combine their scientific curiosity with their newfound physical gifts to solve a cold-case murder that has suddenly become very hot if they can stay alive long enough to catch the killer's scent.

Fortunately, they are now more than friends they're a pack. They are Virals. 

My Take:  


I've only ever seen glimpses of the TV series Bones over my mom's shoulder, so I didn't begin reading Virals with any especially high expectations the way some of the hardcore fans I know might.  After finishing Kathy Reich's first YA novel, though, I'm definitely going to catch the show over winter break.

Protagonist Tory Brennan is one smart girl.  She's the niece of Bones star Temperance Brennan-- which is only mentioned, say, a dozen times in the first half of the book. ;)  Not-so-casual name-dropping aside, Tory's story is fast-paced without skimming over details the way the Maximum Ride series often does.  I've heard Tory compared to Max, and the series to James Patterson's Maximum Ride before, and I have to say I agree. There are more than a few similarities: kids who somehow have animal DNA which gives them supernatural powers... even the cover shot of Tory running through the woods reminded me of Max running from the Erasers.  Anyway, end of drabble.  Long story short, Virals is like a smarter, better-plotted Maximum Ride, with a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. 

Tory's friends Hi, Shelton, and Ben add some humor and sidekick-ing to this potent mix of crime, science, and teenage rebellion.  Together they make up Tory's Pack-- I like how she is the unquestioned leader-- but alone, they're not really brilliantly realized characters.  Hardly more than a hint of romance, for those of you were wondering, despite the three guys.  The action shoots off on the first page and hardly even pauses for breath during the 463 pages that follow.  I read this book in less than two days-- it's a quick read despite its thickness.  The chapters are fairly short, too, once again reminiscent of Max Ride.  The twist ending caught me completely unawares.  

All in all, I really enjoyed Virals-- it was one of the most fun books I've read all year.  I think I'll be passing this one along in an upcoming giveaway, so stay tuned.  

My Rating: 4/5