Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition

I just read one of the classics, maybe not in the literary sense of the word, but certainly in terms of mystery novels. The great Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, is on vacation, but as anyone who has watched “Murder She Wrote” knows, murder seems to follow good detectives such that they can never even have a vacation. And sometimes, as in this book, it’s multiple murders. I don’t think that I’ve read any of Agatha Christie’s books before so this is a new experience for me. I know that she had more than one main detective but that Poirot was her most famous one. One of the interesting things about this book was that I kept waiting on the murder to happen. Though I was pretty sure who it would be, in a sense, that was a part of the mystery, leaving you not completely sure, and so, I won’t tell you either. And the back story is complex enough that there is more than one person that you can imagine as a target. But, it also allowed her to build a better background story for all the main characters making it less of just a puzzle to solve and more personal. There is Linnet Ridgeway, a fabulously wealthy and beautiful young lady who “stole” the fiance of her best friend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, and at this point, Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” kept playing in my mind. They marry and she and her new husband, Simon Doyle are on their honeymoon cruising up the Nile, with Jacqueline also appearing on board to spoil their time. And there are other characters who just “happen” to be around that also have some relationship to one of these three. Having just read a book on the history of Egypt, I found Christie’s detailed descriptions of the journey and the sites along the way to be very interesting and found that she lived in Egypt for several decades, being married to an archeaologist. That added depth to the story as well. And things that seem so incredibly simple at first turn out to be far from such as the story goes on but there are no clues that Mr. Poirot uses to solve the crime that were not also available to you all along. An interesting aside came in the last few chapters of the book when Christie muses on fleeting fame. And with all of that, I would have to admit that, although based on only one book out of the many that she wrote, Christie’s fame has certainly been less fleeting and there is good reason for that. No, it won’t go down in history as a literary classic, but for what it is, it is really very good. It was well worth the purchase price and the time.

An amazing presentation and beautifully read.