To me this is the ultimate locked room mystery – ten people isolated on an island, all of them murdered – who did it? How did they pull it off? Agatha Christie apparently wrote this book as a challenge to herself.
As a reader you know that you are being fooled somehow, but how to identify when it happens? And is it the trick fair? In this book I was pleased that the result seemed fair to me. Without giving away the story I was only a little unsatisfied with the fate of the murderer,and wondered if the explanation would truly be so simple to bring about.
The book contains an epilogue that explains how everything worked, similar to the end of a Scooby-Do episode. Without this I never would have figured it out – all my theories proved incorrect.
The book was sometimes hard to follow – there are ten people and ten backstories and we peek into each person’s head now and then in seemingly random order, so I was sometimes re-reading to figure out who was thinking what. Luckily as they are murdered things get easier to keep track of.
Next I am reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
