Reviews - Peril at End House

2.28k reviews for:

Update:Reread 12/17/24 I'm wondering if I should raise the rating? I think I may have liked this even better the 2nd time around and it looks like both times I finished it in one day so I was obviously very engaged.

Well, she fooled me again. Another fun adventure with the great Hercule Poirot in which I did not guess the ending even partially.
There was one little thing at the very end that slightly bothered me because I wouldn't have thought Poirot would have been ok with a particular outcome... but perhaps under the special circumstances...Anyway I don't want to spoil. But overall another good book.

amyrh's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous challenging mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

tarofish's review against another edition

3.75

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

gjamesmoses's review against another edition

4.0

The sixth Hercule Poirot novel (the “#8” you see on Goodreads includes an anthology and a play), published in 1932. Christie was coming out of a slump (her two previous novels, The Big Four and Murder On the Blue Train, both being among her least-remembered works), and did so in an impressive way; this is her best novel so far (some people will say Ackroyd, which I did like, but I'm not impressed by its gimmick). Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings are called upon to prevent a murder, and as the prospective victim is charming and likable, we finally get some human interest that's been lacking from recent Poirot novels (Christie transparently didn't give a damn about the dead woman in Blue Train, and neither did most of the characters). The rest of the cast is functional, if mostly kind of flat.

In terms of the mystery, it's extremely fairly clued; I figured out the culprit ahead of Poirot, which is unusual for me; I suppose in truth it's a pretty obvious one, but if you think of mysteries as a competition between writer and reader, it would be depressing to never win, so I don't mind that. It's the trick that many writers have striven in vain to master, where one clue, correctly interpreted, causes the entire rest of the novel to snap suddenly into place.

Moving on to criticisms, Hastings is less annoying than he sometimes is, but he's fundamentally a caricature, and I'm not sure if Christie will ever really figure out what to do with him (in fact, people who know of Poirot mainly through the David Suchet productions might be surprised to know that she abandons him relatively quickly; he appears in only eight of her novels). Christie's prose remains functional, but not inspired.