2.5 rounded up, this was disappointing. I wanted more Christie lore and less dumb college girl. I wanted more campy thriller and less wannabe literary fiction. Blah. ( )

Mentioned in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2019/12/23/2019-in-review/

Fast-paced tale in the style of The Secret History, but not quite rising to that level. A few good twists and the added element of interest in Agatha Christie helped it along, though. ( )

This book takes place at a small college and people with a lot of secrets. The book is well-written but I did not connect with the main character. It feels like a lot of other similar mysteries and I would recommend it for people who liked Kate Atkinson's The Secret History. ( )

This was an interesting and very good book, but if failed to reach a five star rating because it went in too many directions and I think tried to do too much. The setup was strong and I cared a lot about our students and the teacher who was the object of awe who are at the heart of the story. The development is nicely done and I found myself very interested to see what was going to happen next. But in the last third of the book it kind of went off the rails and every page was another earth shattering event or another revelation that totally changed your perception of characters and/or events. A little of those things are wonderful, too much and I feel a bit used. There was a trip to what I began to think of in my head as the SYMBOLISM REMOTE COTTAGE where everything that happened was so thick with symbolism I began to not care a bit. It is all built around Agatha Christie, her books and her personal story, and I wonder if I would have gotten more out of it if I had read her books more recently. I read them a lot as a kid but I think, with one exception, it has been 40 years or more since I read them. I think this review may come off as too harsh, the reason I'm pointing out the flaws is that this was definitely a five star book until the train left the tracks. I did "really like it' which is what four stars says. How could I not like a book that has the line "Paralegal drinks every Thursday in the crypts are surprisingly wild..." I'll have to find a crypt in which to drink. I think the overall idea of realizing how difficult it is to pain people or relationships in stark terms is wonderfully delivered here. In life, sometimes you have to not only live with ambiguity but embrace it. As our narrator realizes, "Because in solving something, in pinning it down, in reducing it to one reality, something of the magic is lost." ( )