A Will To Kill

Honestly a 2.5 star book, but I didn't really want to officially rate it as 2 stars.

This book had all the makings of a good Christie-esque mystery: a detective has been invited to a faraway manor in the hills to help the owner with a will related issue. There's a murder and the detective has to solve it.

The beauty of an Agatha Christie mystery, especially a Poirot mystery, is its simplicity. A Will to Kill starts off simple, but at some point it becomes a bit messy. It's the execution that's the problem. It's hard to avoid cliches in mysteries these days, but one can pull off cliches well and the book can still be really good. Unfortunately, this book is filled with cliches and really doesn't do them particularly well.

This book is set in India, but is devoid of a feeling of being in india. Except for the names of the cities, and maybe one or two characters. I'm not sure what i expected for the book to feel “more Indian.” The way the book reads, it could be set anywhere in the world with very little change and it wouldn't affect anything in the plot. That could be a good thing or a bad one. But in the age where there are so many mysteries set all around the world, good ones need to differentiate themselves from the more generic ones. This book failed to do that.

All of that being said, I do think the detective is an interesting character and I will be reading the next book to see if the series is worth following.