And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie
HarperCollins
Fiction, Suspense
Themes: Classics
*****
Description
Mysterious invitations summon ten strangers to the mansion on Soldier Island, just off the Devon coast of England. Each were promised something different - a job, a vacation, a reunion with old friends - but what the find instead is a devious trap rigged by a madman, a trap intended to render long-overdue justice. Can they unite long enough to outwit their tormentor, or is the murderous mastermind among them from the start?
Review
Agatha Christie is considered one of the all-time great writers of mystery and suspense, but I haven't tried reading her works until now. I'm used to classics being somewhat disappointing after the hype. Here, I was pleasantly surprised. Christie manages the tricky feat of establishing ten distinctive characters. They start out as name soup, but become their own people remarkably early on, each with their own burdens of guilt and their own way of handling the situation they're in. Inner demons come out to play as impossible murders stack up, keeping the reader (well, me, at least) guessing the whole way through. It holds up very well today despite being 70-odd years old, and it reads fast. This story may not be the first of its kind (I haven't researched, and am not a huge mystery/suspense fan to know such things), but it set a very high standard for all subsequent tales of secretive strangers gathered in a remote location to be picked off. I found it quite enjoyable, and expect I'll be catching up on more of Christie's classics.