Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

I remember watching this movie almost a decade ago, but I didn't remember anything about the plot or characters. So it was fun to revisit this book and read this Agatha Christie classic. She is so fantastic. In this book, all of the characters are on a ship traveling down the Nile, and one of the women is murdered while they all are asleep. In a lot of ways, this book is similar to Murder on the Orient Express, in that there is a closed list of people who are suspects/possibilities for committing the murder, and there are a bunch of almost-clues that Poirot has to piece together. (But the solution is nowhere as complicated as in that book!) I thought the dark and twisted love relationship between Simon and Jackie was a nice storyline, and I liked some of the secondary characters, especially the staid, practical, and good Cornelia Robson. I really got a kick out of lots of Christie's sarcastic asides, especially while describing the characters towards the beginning of the book. I actually laughed out loud at a few of her descriptions and quietly funny lines.

I noticed something about this book, which I think applies to several of the Armand Gamache books I've read--in order to complicate things and not make the mystery too easy to solve, the author throws in two different and unrelated crimes/issues happening at the same time. In this story, it was the murder and the robbery of the pearls--which just coincidentally happened at the same time but by different people totally unrelated to each other. Kind of unbelievable, but that's how these stories do it quite often. Still enjoyable, and definitely a fun read.