A review by outcolder
Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

3.0

Plot was nonsense, but that hardly matters when so very little of it made sense anyway. Tommy and Tuppence are in their 70s, which makes it all the more weirder and funny when she goes riding on some kind of broken bicycle-horse contraption downhill to crash into a kind of tree called a monkey puzzle... over and over and over again. What! Supposedly they are looking for documents hidden in their country home, but various hiding places are strongly telegraphed but then never explored. Other mysteries, like why the garden shed is called KK are mused over but never explained. Mobs of children and senior citizens make for some stressful comedy and a few chapters featuring a nearly-talking dog — if he could speak, he would say... kind of thing — adds to a kind of dreamlike atmosphere. Christie’s last? book so some of the forgetfulness of “Elephants Never Forget” is probably part of the mood here, a mood that seems to gently dissolve from something like Hitchcock’s Birds into something like bingo night in the palliative care ward. Not “so bad it’s good,” more like, “so demented it’s art.”