Kenneth McMahon

Started out promising with a lot of the ingredients I like - rural English setting, an antiquarian type character conducting historical research and some well written interesting characters - however the middle section of the book became tedious with the lead character becoming increasingly annoying with her constant lecturing and talking down to the family staying with her. Redeems itself a little with the ending but as another reviewer pointed out it would've made a much better short story.

Decent read, good characters and nicely realised atmosphere but most of the stories just end matter-of-factly, with very flat endings. Molly's Aim in particular, the best story in the book, was setting something up nicely and then just ends suddenly.

Wikipedia tells me Nick Carter was originally a gumshoe in the early 20th century but the character was completely rebooted as a spy in the 60s to take advantage of the popularity of the James Bond films. And he very much is a Bond knockoff with him being interrupted by a phone call mid-shag to meet his boss for a new mission (New York and multiple other US cities are going to be blown up with nuclear suitcase bombs by some disaffected Russian baddies who don't like that there's a cold war and would prefer all out mayhem - one character is literally named Warnow). Then he meets the Q knockoff who shows him a few of the new gadgets he's invented and like the Bond films, they all come in handy later on. And like Bond, the womanising is off the charts. In fact, it's so absurd here that it actually just becomes hilarious. He beds 5 women here, all within minutes of meeting them. They're literally gagging for it as soon as they lay eyes on him. It's all very teenage boy wish fulfillment stuff but again it's so over the top that it becomes absurdly funny and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a fun diversionary quick read.

Figured I'd get it read before Branagh's movie comes out. It's supposedly based on this book, but the trailer bears no resemblance to the book whatsoever, with its seances and supernatural goings on and its Venice setting.

The premise is a cracking one. Talk at a party comes around to murder and a 13 year old girl mentions that she once witnessed a murder. Nobody believes her but an hour later, she's found head down in a bucket permanently bobbing for apples. This is Christie in her later years so she seems to shoehorn some of her own moaning in whenever she can. She has four different characters mention apropos of nothing that “they don't keep mental patients locked up anymore, they just send them home these days to live in the community”. The talk of the killer potentially being “some mentally disturbed person” who walked into the party and spotted an opportunity occurs so much that you would think it must have some relevance to the outcome. Characters also complain more than once of mothers not raising their children right anymore, children getting into cars with strangers and long haired young men smashing up phone boxes for the hell of it. Though she does have the good sense to have a dialogue between teenage boys and immediately start off by saying they had a very adult manner and if you closed your eyes you might think it was two elderly gentlemen speaking. Nobody wants to read Agatha Christie's attempts at 60s youth slang.

Quite a dull read overall with Poirot plodding around repeatedly asking characters the same questions like a Broken Sword game - “And what did you think of the young girl who was murdered?” “What do you know about the foreign girl who disappeared a few years ago?” etc. In the end, the mystery and its reveal weren't particularly interesting. I'm not sure the motives of the killer fully make sense but I'm also past the point of thinking about it too much.

Just how many words can be written about a single photograph? Felt like a lot of repetitive filler here, like Winchester had a word quota he needed to fill. This is the second of his books I've read and like that one (The Professor and the Madman) there's a ton of random speculation. I'm just not sure I get along with this writer, which is a pity because I tend to like the subject matter he chooses to write about.