Reviews

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

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nurosanay's review against another edition

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.0

gmcuriousgeorge's review against another edition

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3.0

Random anecdote related to this book, while I was on like page 160:
First day of class (school year here begins in January) and I'm meeting my new homeroom teacher.
Teacher: So tell me a bit about yourselves, your names and something you like.
The class: *silence*
Me: I'll go, then.
Teacher: Okay, go on.
Me: I'm Cynthia and I love to read. I'm currently reading La Casa Torcida by Agatha Christie.
Teacher: Cool! Is it good?
Me: Yeah, pretty good.
Boy, was I not expecting a thing...

So, there's huge this family that lives in a "Crooked House," and the main character, Charles, wants to marry one of the family members, Sophia. But guess what? The "patriarch" and oldest member of the family, Aristide Leonides, is poisoned and killed unexpectedly. Charles's dad is a police officer, so he is asked to help solve the mystery.

I was fine with there being no Poirot in this book, it's something different from normal Christie books. The characters were fine, and I didn't find it hard to keep track of them and their personalities. This book was constantly in movement and, just as other Agatha Christie books contains a lot of dialogue containing clues and possible motives for the characters.

IT'S SPOILER TIME!!

As I've said, the book was good. It WAS, before the ending happened. The twist was good and Christie literally had to go for the most unexpected one, which also means having a twelve-year-old murderer. Which makes no sense. And it's disturbing. I know you're thinking: "It's a murder-mystery, it ought to be a little bit disturbing." And I agree, but revealing the murderer's identity is a serious business, and please don't make them a child. Just, no.

"Tía Edith" would have made more sense, also thanks to that almost-final scene of her randomly taking Josephine for a car ride and proceeding to crash the car. There's no way you can justify killing a child on purpose, s e r i o u s l y.

Well, that's that. If I'd written this review for only, let's say, the first 200 pages, I would have given it 4 stars. But the ending dropped it down to like 3.25 stars. Congratulations, my first less than 3-star read of the year! Not even in the second half of January!

I AM going to read more Agatha Christie books, but hopefully they're more like Hercule Poirot's Christmas and The Mysterious Affair at Styles.