Appointment with Death

Evil old woman
making her family squirm
now they can relax.

I'm not a big Christie fan I mostly picked this up because I want to read more in German and my father had a German copy lying around. I rarely get to read physical books these days and reading this in physical form felt good, I probably enjoyed this more because of this. If this was digital I might not have finished it. Either way it didn't feel like a waste of time because I was mainly reading to reactivate my German vocab - so, rolling the score up.

Even considering the release date this is absurdly sexist. It's not regular period-standard sexism , discussions on women and women's place in society and relationship with power has an overwhelming presence in the first half, and continues to be relevant in the second. I don't know much about Agatha Christie's life or politics to contextualize this, but it definitely felt like she had an agenda here and made the first half of this book an exercise in patience.

The second half is when Poirot makes a real appearance, the aforementioned issue isn't gone completely but much less on the foreground. The solution to the mystery itself wasn't very interesting, but the twist of basically everyone in the family thinking another did it and trying to cover for them was a really fun one. I wish it meandered less in the first half.

Also a random note about my German copy some things seem to have been changed rather arbitrarily, stuff I noticed.
Sarah's name was changed to Sylvia
Carol's name was changed to Carola
A few paragraphs about religion were removed

I listened to the BBC dramatisation version of this audio book and thoroughly enjoyed the voice acting. The story and the murder was set mostly in Petra, somewhere I truly wish to visit but even if I wasn't aware of this spectacular wonder, I would have had no trouble visualising the scene of the crime.
In normal Christie style, all of the evidence is laid out before us and I still was none the wiser as to the murderer until dutifully informed by Monsieur Poirot along with the rest of the dumb struck and gapping cast. I need to read more of these and maybe I will get a little wiser.