Book #35: Thirteen at Dinner by Agatha Christie

I stayed at a friend's house today watching their kids all day while she was in surgery, and this book was on their bookshelf in the front room. And would you believe that I read the whole thing during the day while watching three kids (their two and Dane)? Because I did! Ridiculous, I know. I still felt totally wiped out and exhausted at the end of the day (and, I was there for eleven hours so it makes sense) but obviously I wasn't too crazy busy because I managed to read this entire book while I was there.

A famous actress, Jane Wilkinson, approaches Poirot and asks him to help her get rid of her husband. She jokes about killing him but mostly asks him to help her get a divorce. A few days later, her husband actually ends up dead--and the actress has a solid alibi. It's a classic whodunit!

Honestly, I don't have too much to say about this book. It was a Hercule Poirot mystery, and of course I didn't figure it out until the end, so it was a success. That's the great thing about Christie's novels. I don't know, but I feel like many of Christie's novels with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot don't have very satisfying reasons for how the sleuth figures out the mystery in the end. Usually it's just that they just get a lightbulb to go on in their mind and that helps everything to fall into place and then they can explain how they knew the whole thing happened, but it's not usually that it's something that anyone (such as the reader) could figure out. AKA, sometimes I feel like Christie makes things a bit too convenient for her sleuths. But you know what? Whatever. She does do a fantastic job of weaving the mystery and making it too hard to guess, so she does her job as the author just fine.