The Monogram Murders
Hercule Poirot’s quiet meal at a London coffeehouse in 1929 is interrupted by a frantic woman. She declares she will soon be murdered – and deserves her fate. She pleads for her killer not to be punished, then runs off before Poirot can assist her.
Meanwhile, three murders are discovered at a posh hotel a half hour away. Poirot accompanies his friend, Edward Catchpool, a policeman from Scotland Yard, to investigate. The victims are laid out neatly, as if for a funeral, in a separate room with monogrammed cufflinks placed in their mouths. The victims all knew one another and had gathered together under false pretenses. Poirot believes his run-in with the woman at the coffeehouse and these murders are somehow connected. As he unravels the clues, the evidence leads to a small village and a terrible incident that took place there over a decade before. A servant’s vicious lie, and the deaths, or possible suicides, of a vicar and his wife, had set into motion the tragic outcome at the hotel.
Catchpool comes off as too naive and a little slipshod – to showcase Poirot’s shrewdness, of course – for a man in his investigative position. The plot is overly complicated, with several odd twists and overlapping renditions of the events. Poirot figures out the most obscure truths from the slightest clues while Catchpool seldom has a clue. However, the story kept me engrossed. Agatha Christie’s great detective is given new life by Sophie Hannah, and his mannerisms and speech match the original in amusing ways.
