And Then There Were None

Three Agatha Christie books in 1 ... And Then There Were None, Crooked House, and Endless Night.

Christie will never be my favorite author, but drawing room mysteries will never be my favorite genre either, so...

I joke that you should do a shot every time Christie is racist. Don't come at me. She was a product of her time, and the original title of And Then There Were None could not be any more eye-poppingly horrible. I've never read a Christie novel without a racist moment or moments. I accept these are the price of admission, or baked into the cake, or something.

I did like that each novel was genuinely different, felt genuinely different, than every other novel. That's amazing, really. Crooked House was my favorite, but I would say Endless Night holds up the best in having tropes and twists that would still be used, and work, today. At the same time, this is what also makes it perhaps most predictable – the things you would assume in a modern novel are the things you can assume here, making the murderer so obvious that you immediately dismiss this person as being too obvious. And then, yeah. Even with that, I appreciated that there was clues I missed. I figured out the general thing, but there were other details in plain sight I only got when it was all laid out.

And Then There Were None was my least favorite, and felt the most dated for me. I cared about and rooted for no one, which in all fairness makes sense as everyone was meant to be a villain. Still, none of the characters came alive for me, and it was the epitome of plot at the expense of character, and I'm a fan of character above all.