Hello everyone!
So last week, I started the review on 'After the Funeral', but since I hadn't managed to finish the book by then, I left at the point where there have been two murders (Richard Abernethie and his sister Cora), and Hercule Poirot has made his appearance, while the lawyer Entwhistle has done some poking about, and I had the feeling that there would be more murders hanging about.
I was close.
But not quite.
There wasn't precisely a murder, BUT the companion to the late Cora, Miss Gilchrist (again, the spelling of these names is giving me headaches, and I'm not someone who usually has problems with this!), found apiece of wedding cake sent to her from a couple she thought she remembered. Cora's niece politely refuses to taste it, but the companion does, and in the middle of the night the doctor has to be called for, resulting in ...
... his statement that she had been poisoned with Arsenic.
Cue my blinking face.
Prior to that, a friend of the late Cora who knows a thing or two about art came by to appraise some of the pictures she had apparently bought for little money, and he departs with a sad shake of the head. More on him later. Right now, Poirot decides to take things into his own hands, callin all the relatives of both the deceased to the old family home once more, to observe them. He makes up a phony identity (which later gets thrown out the window by one of the women there) to talk to them without them feeling like they're being observed or asked questions, and quickly, a lot of things come to light:
as in, everybody's lying.
It's a sort of staple for an Agatha Christie novel, though, considering that I've read more than thirty by now. I've come to realize that, no matter who the deceased is, and who is implicated, everyone will tell the precise opposite of the truth the first time around.
And here? We get another almost-victim, as Helen, Richard's sister-in-law, is smacked upside the head with a heavy object, earning a concussion, which spurrs Poirot into action.
Not to give too much away about precisely WHAT everyone was lying about, but the murder was committed because the painter friend of Cora's would have recognized a Vermeer she had no idea she had in her position - and it had been painted over. Go figure that it would be because of a painting and not because of the inheritance. Richard Abernethie was actually NOT murdered, or well it was not deduced, but it was IMPLIED, so that the murder of Cora would be cleverly disguised and tied in with the first one.
How insane is that?
These kind of things always happen in a Christie novel, though; I've been at a point once when I was SURE I knew who the murderer was, and then I turned the page, and Poirot, who had up until that point agreed to it all, suddenly changed his mind and ripped the whole thing apart, saying it's untrue.
Sigh,
But I do recommend any of the author's books, however, because they're entertaining, and you need to keep 'ze little grey cells' on top of their game. Plus, well, they're classics.
Have you read any Agatha Christie books? Which one's your favourite?
xx
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