It is not midnight when this tale begins, but ten minutes before two on the afternoon of 22nd of February 1931. That was when the strangeness started, as M. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool (his friend, and the teller of this story) stood with thirty strangers in a dispersed huddle - no one too close to anybody else, but all of us easily identifiable as an assembly - on London's Buckingham Palace Road..

Putting this back on the "to read" list, since the first two chapters annoyed me beyond all logic and reason. It could be pandemic lockdown, it could be Hannah's whacko approach to Poirot. You be the judge.

Poirot and hysterical people in a country estate and several murders - easy read to pass the time

Quizás no es Agatha Christie, pero está muy bien y entretiene mucho. Lo he devorado. ( )

Red herrings, twists and turns, lots of lies, confusing motivations and a long list of characters make ‘The Killings at Kingfisher Hill’ by crime writer Sophie Hannah the type of book you need to read when fully alert. Fourth in Hannah’s series of continuation Hercule Poirot mysteries, I finished it with mixed feelings.
Direct comparisons of Hannah and Christie seem unfair as these are continuation novels. Christie was a highly accomplished author who balanced likeable characters with dense but ultimately solveable crimes, while at the same time making the novels appealingly comfortable to read. If ‘The Killings at Kingfisher Hill’ were a standalone novel featuring an unknown detective, it would be free of these comparisons. I enjoyed ‘The Mystery of Three Quarters’, third of Hannah’s Poirot novels, and will continue to read this series. It has also given me renewed impetus to re-read the Christie originals.
The complications start at the beginning. Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool are about to board a char-a-banc for Surrey and the exclusive Kingfisher Hill development, when they encounter not one but two women passengers behave strangely. One fears she is about to be murdered on the bus if she sits in a specific seat. The second woman confesses she has killed someone. Christie’s novels always have options – for victim, and murderer – but the options here did seem rather full-on with numerous characters introduced or mentioned in quick succession with none fully-formed in my mind. At one point I felt as Inspector Catchpool does, ‘My mind blurred, then went blank.’ So many possibilities in quick succession made me long for Christie’s more leisurely pace. True to character, Poirot is totally in charge of his investigation. He tells Catchpool, ‘Once one has a point of focus, all of the other details start to arrange themselves around it.’
Throughout I felt two steps away from the action because the murder has happened before the book begins. We are told the story of Poirot’s investigation by Catchpool and hear much of the necessary information as told to Poirot by third parties. Hearsay. I longed to be in the moment as it actually happened, or at the very least immediately afterwards – I think here of Poirot in ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, ‘Evil Under the Sun’ and ‘Death on the Nile’.
‘The Killings at Kingfisher Hill’ wasn’t quite what I expected.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ ( )